Inter- and intragranular effects in superconducting compacted platinum powders

Abstract

Compacted platinum powders exhibit a sharp onset of diamagnetic screening at T≃1.9 mK in zero magnetic field in all samples investigated. This sharp onset is interpreted in terms of the intragranular transition into the superconducting state. At lower temperatures, the magnetic ac susceptibility strongly depends on the ac field amplitude and reflects the small intergranular critical current density jc. This critical current density shows a strong dependence on the packing fraction f of the granular samples. Surprisingly, jc increases significantly with decreasing f [jc(B=0, T=0)≃0.07 A/cm2 for f=0.67 and jc(B=0, T=0)≃0.8 A/cm2 for f=0.50]. The temperature dependence of jc shows strong positive curvature over a wide temperature range for both samples. The phase diagrams of inter- and intragranular superconductivity for different samples indicate that the granular structure might play the key role for an understanding of the origin of superconductivity in the platinum compacts.

Source-reported materials — not catalogue approval

Similar papers