DC magnetron sputtering of yttrium and bismuth based high-Tc films

Many attempts have been described to prepare high quality, superconducting YBa2Cu3O7-y (YBCO) and Bi2Sr2CanCun+1Ox, n=1,2, (BSCCO) thin films by dc or rf sputtering from a single ceramic target. However, not all of them were fully successful, mainly because of the severe resputtering effects occurring during the film deposition. Most of the methods employing rf sputtering had to apply off-stoichiometrical targets (e.g. YBa6Cu10Ox in the case of YBCO deposition) and many dc magnetrons were operated under very high gas pressure conditions (Ar or Ar + O2 above 100 Pa). In this paper, the authors present their results of dc magnetron sputtering from single stoichiometric YBCO and BSCCO targets using a classical gas pressure range of magnetron operation i.e. between 10 and 0.1 Pa, thus, taking advantage of a high deposition rate available under these conditions