Ion Irradiation
Ion irradiation has been one of the main focuses of the research group for more than two decades, in collaboration with INFN.
Creation of defects in superconductors via ion irradiation is one of the most promising ways to optimize their properties for applications and the most efficient tool to study the disorder dependence of their fundamental properties. Irradiation-induced defects act as pinning centers, enhancing vortex pinning and critical current density. By selecting the irradiation conditions, such as ion species and energy, it is possible to create defects that range from point-like to columnar. Both uniform distributions of defects and pre-determined patterns can be obtained using defocused beams and collimated
beams or masks, respectively. However, defects also act as scattering centers for charge carriers, resulting in a decrease of the critical temperature of the material and in an increase of the normal state resistivity. This often undesired effect has been a subject of fundamental studies aimed at the determination of the pairing state of newly discovered superconductors.
Our group performs most irradiation experiments at dedicated beamlines at the Laboratori Nazionali di Legnaro of INFN after careful experiment design with Monte Carlo simulations.
In addition to the tuning of superconducting properties, we also perform irradiation for radiation hardness tests on structural and functional materials.
The talk below provides a summary of this activity:
