Ion Implantation — A Promising Technique for the Production of New Superconducting Materials

Abstract

Since the discovery of superconductivity the research of many experimentalists was motivated by the desire to raise the superconducting transition temperature, T_c, to high enough values that the widespread technological potential of superconductivity could be used in an economically feasable manner. This was the reason why a large variety of newly developed techniques for materials preparation were immediately applied in superconductivity. In this manner methods like rapid quenching from the vapor or the liquid phase, sputtering, chemical vapor deposition and high pressure techniques resulted in a high variety of interesting superconducting phases. During the midsixties the semiconductor industries applied very successfully ion implantation for the doping of semiconducting materials. For this reason the group with Prof. Buckel at the university in Karlsruhe started to introduce this technique in superconductivity. Although they originally intended to use ion implantation only for the well-defined doping of superconductors with magnetic impurities, the applicability of this technique to the production of new materials became quite obvious. Hence up to now mainly three experimental groups situated in the nuclear research centers in Karlsruhe and Jülich as well as in Orsay have joined the work on ion implantation in superconductors. The interesting results achieved by these groups have been reviewed recently by several authors.¹⁻⁵ For this reason in the following I do not intend to give a complete overview of this field. Instead I want to restrict myself to a few selected examples demonstrating the widespread applicability of the ion implantation technique in superconductivity. The discussion will not only include interesting superconducting properties but also new metallurgical aspects as well as new insights in the implantation technique.