Perspectives on the limits of fabrication and measurement - High-Tc superconductors tailored on the nanometre-scale

High-Tc superconductors are characterized by an unusually small coherence length, which amounts to a few angstroms only. As the coherence length is the length scale in which a superconductor has to be structured to achieve Josephson junction behaviour, considerable effort has been devoted by many groups to modify high-Tc films in the nanometre scale. Because the high-Tc cuprates do not lend themselves for nanostructuring, new concepts have to be developed to achieve this goal. These developments will be discussed and an overview of the state of the art of the field will be presented with a special focus on the ultimate limitations of nanoscale structuring of superconductors.