High Critical Currents in Oxide Superconductors

The low critical current densities in bulk, high temperature superconductors have been one of the major barriers to the development and applications of the new materials. In this paper, we report substantially improved J sub c in polycrystalline Y-Ba-Cu-O through melt-textured growth processing which creates an essentially 100% dense structure consisting of long, preferentially- aligned gains parallel to the a-b conduction plane.