BSCCO tapes

Patent Granted BSCCO was the first HTS material to be used for making practical superconducting wires. All HTS have an extremely short coherence length, of the order of 1.6 nm. This means that the grains in a polycrystalline wire must be extremely good contact – they must be atomically smooth. Further, because the superconductivity resides substantially only in the copper-oxygen planes the grains must be crystallographically aligned. BSCCO is therefore a good candidate because its grains can be aligned either by melt processing or by mechanical deformation.