Structure versus properties in High-temperature superconductors

This is the final report of a one-year, Laboratory-Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). High-temperature superconductors (HTS) have crystal structure that make them a distorted subset of Perovskite materials. The complexity of the superconductors arising from the large number of elements that they possess gives us all sorts of imperfect regions in our materials, and these regions tend to show Perovskite-like properties. This project sought to expand our fundamental understanding of high-temperature superconductors by combining experimental and theoretical studies of this class of novel materials. The research objectives were to interrelate structural and superconducting properties of HTS materials to further understand parameters influencing their behavior in important power and electronic applications