Thickness Effect on the Structural and Electrical Properties of Sputtered YBCO Coated Conductors

In this paper we studied the structural and electrical properties variations with the thickness of YBa2Cu3O7-X (YBCO) film. In our experiments, the critical current density (Jc) has a maximum at 1.2 micron rather than monotonically decreased with increasing film thickness. The in-plane and out-plane alignments of the films, measured with X-ray Diffraction Omega-scan and Phi-scan, were poor at the beginning stage of the deposition and then became better as the film thickness increased. The surfaces of different samples also change a lot while films less than 700 nm in thickness. Under optimized deposition conditions, biaxial textured YBCO films have been obtained, with the full width at half maximum being 2.1 degrees and 4.5 degrees for out-of-plane and in-plane orientations respectively, Jc greater than 1.2 MA/cm(2) at 77 K, self field.