Sputter synthesis of c-axis YBCO films with excellent surface smoothness and fabrication of sandwich type Junctions with interface engineered barrier

Abstract

Flat surface is essential to base electrodes of sandwich type Josephson junctions. In the present study, c-axis YBa2Cu3O 7 (c-YBCO) films with excellent surface smoothness were fabricated by off-axis sputtering. For the flat surfaces, key parameters in the sputtering process were growth temperature, atmosphere conditions and surface nature of substrates. The correlation between the sputtering conditions and the characteristic of the c-YBCO films reveal the following phenomena; i) The films deposited at low temperature of 660 °C showed a low zero-resistance temperature because of a poor connection between the c-axis crystallites. Surfaces of these low temperature grown films involve large and rectangular shaped a-axis grains, thereby the peak-to-valley (PV) amplitude of the surface was beyond 80 nm. The experiments indicate that the growth of the grains should be caused by low surface diffusion of adatoms at the low growth temperature. ii) Contrarily, at high Ts above 770 °C, a serious deviation of film composition from the stoichiometry took places, which also promoted an outgrowth of a-axis grains. Consequently, the high temperature grown films had seriously rough surfaces (PV amplitude > 25 nm). iii) The growth at the optimised Ts of 765 °C led a remarkable reduction of surface roughness (root-mean-square (RMS) of the roughness < 1.8 nm) without any degradation of superconducting properties. The achieved surface morphology is classified as one of the smoothest surfaces of the YBCO film grow by sputtering. iv) A density of the a-axis outgrowth was related to the surface defects of the substrate. The usage of SrTiO3 (100) plane consists of atomically flat and wide terraces and unit-cell high steps resulted in almost outgrowth-face surface with an excellent smoothness (PV amplitude < 10 nm, RMS of the roughness < 1.0 nm). © 2006 IOP Publishing Ltd.