Effective Approach to Prepare Well c‑Axis-Oriented YBCO Crystal by Top-Seeded Melt-Growth

The growth of large single crystals of YBCO is a matter of significant importance in the study of superconductivity by neutron scattering experiments. For this reason, a well c-axis-oriented YBCO crystal with a size of 34 mm in diameter was successfully fabricated by modified melt-growth. First, our findings show that the thermal stability of the film-seed could be enhanced by introducing an intermediate mini-pellet between film and bulk. Furthermore, we present evidence to prove that the serious liquid loss could be suppressed by the CeO2 addition. Finally, the interesting question we addressed is the nature of the formation of distinctive growing macrostructures, such as ambiguous growth facet lines, and the corner-concaved a–b plane. Most importantly, apart from YBCO, our new approach strongly suggests the possibility of synthesizing large crystals for more attractive members in its family, i.e., chemically doped YBCO materials, being unsuccessful by the prior art crystal growth methods.