Resistivity, Thermopower And Single-Particle Tunneling Studies On Some Zinc-Doped Yttrium Barium Copper Oxide Superconductors

Resistance and thermopower measurements have been made on a series of compounds, YBa2Cu3-xZnx07_Yl, with x - 0.025, 0.05, 0.1, 0.15 and 0.2. The superconducting transition temperature decreases as the zinc concentration increases. In a range of temperatures below TM, the mid point of the transition, the resistance shows an exponential temperature dependence fitting the phenomenological formula proposed by Ausloos et ai From the plot of logarithm of resistivity vs. (TM- T)1/2/T, one deduces a value of the average dimension of the Josephson junction to be a few tens of A, suggesting the microtwin boundaries to be the location of the junctions. The thermopower shows a peak always just above Tc. This conclusively shows that phonon drag is not the cause of the peak. The temperature dependence of the thermopower appears to resemble closely the earlier observations of Srinivasan et al. on yttrium barium copper oxide. Single-particle tunneling measurements carried out for two concentrations, x = 0 and 0.05, appear to indicate that the energy gap parameter scales with Tc, and 2Δ/kTchas an approximate value of 5.5. © 1989, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. All rights reserved.