Development of Strontium Titanate Thin films on Technical Substrates for Superconducting Coated Conductors

SrTiO3 is a widely studied perovskite material due to its advantages as a template for high temperature superconducting tapes. Heteroepitaxial SrTiO3 thin films were deposited on Ni/W tapes using dip-coating in a precursor solution followed by drying and annealing under reducing conditions. Nearly complete coverage of the underlying substrate was obtained for bi-layers and tri-layers. The 3rd coating is grown with a better homo-epitaxial growth, resulting in an improvement of the orientation factor. The obtained thin films have been characterized in terms of caxis texture and surface morphology, suggesting a good template for further deposition of YBCO superconducting layers.