We report the successful manufacture and characterization of a microwave resonant cylindrical cavity made of bulk MgB2 superconductor (Tc ≈ 38.5 K), which has been produced by the Reactive Liquid Mg Infiltration technique. The quality factor of the cavity for the TE011 mode, resonating at 9.79 GHz, has been measured as a function of the temperature. At T = 4.2 K, the unloaded quality factor is ...

130 LLE Review, Volume 91 The recent discovery of superconductivity at 39 K in hexagonal magnesium diborides1 has stimulated very intensive investigations of the fundamental mechanism of superconductivity in MgB2 as well as the possible practical applications of this new superconductor. In comparison with high-temperature cuprates, MgB2 superconductors have more than two-timeslower anisotropy, ...

The MgB2 bulks were prepared by high energy milling of Mg and B powder. The correlations among milling times, microstructure and superconducting properties were investigated in MgB2 bulks. Samples were characterized by x-ray diffraction (XRD), energy dispersive spectrometry (EDX) and scanning electron microscope (SEM), and the magnetization properties were examined by a Superconducting quantum ...

The layered lithium borocarbide LiBC, isovalent with and structurally similar to the superconductor MgB2, is an insulator due to the modulation within the hexagonal layers (BC vs B2). We show that hole doping of LiBC results in Fermi surfaces of B-C p sigma character that couple very strongly to B-C bond stretching modes, precisely the features that lead to superconductivity at T(c) approximate...

Doping of MgB2 by nano-SiC and its potential for the improvement of flux pinning were studied for MgB22x(SiC)x/2 with x50, 0.2, and 0.3 and for 10 wt % nano-SiC-doped MgB2 samples. Cosubstitution of B by Si and C counterbalanced the effects of single-element doping, decreasing Tc by only 1.5 K, introducing intragrain pinning centers effective at high fields and temperatures, and significantly e...

Controlled chemical doping of magnesium diboride (MgB2) has been shown to substantially improve its superconducting properties to the levels required for high field magnets, but the doping is difficult to accomplish through the usual route of solid state reaction and diffusion. Further, superconducting cables of MgB2 are difficult to fabricate because of the friable nature of the material. In t...

A theoretical model for quasiparticle and Josephson tunneling in multiband superconductors is developed and applied to MgB2-based junctions. The gap functions in different bands in MgB2 are obtained from an extended Eliashberg formalism, using the results of band structure calculations. The temperature and angle dependencies of MgB2 tunneling spectra and the Josephson critical current are calcu...

High temperatures and under pressure (HTP) processing has been used to study the effects of chemical doping in MgB2. ZrB2, TiB2 and NbB2 were selected as additives since, like MgB2, they have an AlB2-type structure and similar lattice parameters. Dy2O3 was selected as it has been reported to generate nanoscale, secondary intragrain phases in MgB2. While C is known to enter the B-sublattice read...