The discovery of superconductivity at 39 K in MgB 2 1 raises many issues. One of the central questions is whether this new superconductor resembles a hightemperature-cuprate superconductor or a lowtemperature metallic superconductor in terms of its current carrying characteristics in applied magnetic fields. In spite of the very high transition temperatures of the cuprate superconductors, their performance in magnetic fields has several drawbacks 2 . Their large anisotropy restricts high bulk current densities to much less than the full magnetic field-temperature (H-T) space over which superconductivity is found. Further, weak coupling across grain boundaries makes transport current densities in untextured polycrystalline forms low and strongly magnetic field sensitive 3,4 . These studies of MgB 2 address both issues. In spite of the multi-phase, untextured, nano-scale sub-divided nature of our samples, supercurrents flow throughout without the strong sensitivity to weak magnetic fields characteristic of Josephson-coupled grains 3 . Magnetization measurements over nearly all of the superconducting H-T plane show good temperature scaling of the flux pinning force, suggestive of a current density determine d by flux pinning. At least two length scales are suggested by the magnetization and magneto optical (MO) analysis but the cause of this seems to be phase inhomogeneity, porosity, and minority insulating phase such as MgO rather than by weakly coupled grain boundaries. Our results suggest that polycrystalline ceramics of this new class of superconductor will not be compromised by the weak link problems of the high temperature superconductors, a conclusion with enormous significance for applications if higher temperature analogs of this compound can be discovered.The principal samples were synthesized by direct reaction of bright Mg flakes (Aldrich Chemical) and sub-micron amorphous B powder (Callery Chemical). Starting materials were lightly mixed in half-gram batches, and pressed into pellets. These pellets were placed on Ta foil, which was in turn placed on Al 2 O 3 boats, and fired in a tube furnace under a mixed gas of 95% Ar 5% H 2 for 1 hour at 600 C, 1 hour at 800 C, and 1 hour at 900 C, and then lightly ground. The resulting powders were pressed into pellets and then hot pressed at 10 kbar at temperatures between 650 and 800 °C for periods between 1 and 5.5 hours. Disks ~4 mm in diameter and ~1 mm thick were cut from these pellets for property characterization. As noted later, this process cannot yet be considered optimum.Magnetization properties were examined in SQUID and vibrating sample magnetometers (VSM) in applied fields up to 14 T from 4.2 to above T c . Figure 1 shows onset T c values of 37-38 K for the above samples and for commercial MgB 2 powder (99.5%, ~2 µm diameter by examination, CERAC). Sample 1 and the commercial powder show smooth transitions with some temperature dependence of the zerofield cooled (ZFC) shielded moment, while sample 3 exhibits a step, indicative of non-uniformity in su...

The discovery of superconductivity at 39 K in magnesium diboride offers the possibility of a new class of low-cost, high-performance superconducting materials for magnets and electronic applications. This compound has twice the transition temperature of Nb3Sn and four times that of Nb-Ti alloy, and the vital prerequisite of strongly linked current flow has already been demonstrated. One possible drawback, however, is that the magnetic field at which superconductivity is destroyed is modest. Furthermore, the field which limits the range of practical applications-the irreversibility field H*(T)-is approximately 7 T at liquid helium temperature (4.2 K), significantly lower than about 10 T for Nb-Ti (ref. 6) and approximately 20 T for Nb3Sn (ref. 7). Here we show that MgB2 thin films that are alloyed with oxygen can exhibit a much steeper temperature dependence of H*(T) than is observed in bulk materials, yielding an H* value at 4.2 K greater than 14 T. In addition, very high critical current densities at 4.2 K are achieved: 1 MA cm-2 at 1 T and 105 A cm-2 at 10 T. These results demonstrate that MgB2 has potential for high-field superconducting applications.

Less than two years after the discovery of high temperature superconductivity in oxypnictide LaFeAs(O,F) several families of superconductors based on Fe layers (1111, 122,11, 111) are available. They share several characteristics with cuprate superconductors that compromise easy applications, such as the layered structure, the small coherence length, and unconventional pairing, On the other hand the Fe-based superconductors have metallic parent compounds, and their electronic anisotropy is generally smaller and does not strongly depend on the level of doping, the supposed order parameter symmetry is s wave, thus in principle not so detrimental to current transmission across grain boundaries. From the application point of view, the main efforts are still devoted to investigate the superconducting properties, to distinguish intrinsic from extrinsic behaviours and to compare the different families in order to identify which one is the fittest for the quest for better and more practical superconductors. The 1111 family shows the highest T c , huge but also the most anisotropic upper critical field and in-field, fan-shaped resistive transitions reminiscent of those of cuprates, while the 122 family is much less anisotropic with sharper resistive transitions as in low temperature superconductors, but with about half the T c of the 1111 compounds. An overview of the main superconducting properties relevant to applications will be presented. Upper critical field, electronic anisotropy parameter, intragranular and intergranular critical current density will be discussed and compared, where possible, across the Fe-based superconductor families. 2 , to the ab-plane. 12 The temperature dependence is very different in the two directions, strongly departing from the WHH behaviour 16 mainly in the direction parallel to c. The anisotropy evaluated as γ = ab c ab c H H H ⊥ = 2 // 2 / γ, is also strongly temperature dependent, reminiscent of the two-gap behaviour seen in MgB 2 . 17,18 However, a different situation is observed in the 122 family. (Ba,K)Fe 2 As 2 single crystals exhibit nearly isotropic μ 0 H c2 with

Early studies have found quasi-reversible magnetization curves in polycrystalline bulk rare-earth iron oxypnictides that suggest either wide-spread obstacles to intergranular current or very weak vortex pinning. In the present study of polycrystalline samarium and neodymium rare-earth iron oxypnictide samples made by high pressure synthesis, the hysteretic magnetization is significantly enhanced. Magneto optical imaging and study of the field dependence of the remanent magnetization as a function of particle size both show that global currents over the whole sample do exist but that the intergranular and intragranular current densities have distinctively different temperature dependences and differ in magnitude by about 1000. Assuming that the highest current density loops are restricted to circulation only within grains leads to values of ~5×10 6 A/cm 2 at 5 K and self field, while whole-sample current densities, though two orders of magnitude lower are 1000-10000 A/cm 2 , some two orders of magnitude higher than in random polycrystalline cuprates. We cannot yet be certain whether this large difference in global and intragrain current density is intrinsic to the oxypnictides or due to extrinsic barriers to current flow, because the samples contain significant second phase, some of which wets the grain boundaries and produces evidences of SNS proximity effect in the whole sample critical current. 2 Introduction:The recent discovery of superconductivity in the LaFeAsO 1-x F x compound [1] has stimulated a rapid exploration of superconductivity in the rare earth iron oxypnictides [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. It has now been established that the iron oxypnictides can be superconducting when doped to x ~0.05-0.2 and that they can have transition temperature T c above 40 K when La is replaced by Ce [5] and above 50 K by Pr, Nd, Sm and Gd [7][8][9][10][11]. In a recent paper [12] we addressed the issue of electromagnetic granularity in polycrystalline La iron oxypnictides, finding an asymmetric M(H) loop that indicated an irreversible moment due to hysteretic bulk currents that was almost as small as the reversible magnetization of the superconducting state. In that case we were not able to distinguish definitively between a state where the intragrain pinning was very weak, leading to very low intragrain current densities or to the state where currents were largely confined to the intragrain regions and might have been rather high. Based on the rather high upper critical field B c2 (0) values of 63-65 T observed by Hunte et al.