Some of the higher Tc (superconducting critical temperature) Fe superconductors appear to be important functional materials for industrial, technological and medical applications. We recently observed that 2.5×1015 Ar/cm2 irradiations by 1.5 MeV Ar6+ enhanced Tc of single crystals (SXLs) of the novel Fe high temperature (HT) superconductor Ba(Fe0.943Co0.057)2As2 by 7.8 K from its initial Tc(completion) of 16.0 K as measured from electrical resistivity, matching the results of further measurements from the real and imaginary parts of the magnetic susceptibility and magnetization. This is a whopping ~ 49% increase in contrast to usual radiation damage of Tc. This is a new finding using a charged particle beam. We continued the characterizations in magnetic fields up to 14 T getting expected results.

Here, the ions (Range = 0.903 m) get implanted in our ~200 m thick crystals. Ar being insoluble in the solid, the implanted ions precipitate forming small-sized high pressure (HP) bubbles in the solid[1]. We feel that these HP bubbles considerably compress the superconductor lattice. That increases Tc[2].

Our SXL samples retained the implantation-induced enhancement of Tc for over 1 year. That ignites a hope of utilizing such enhanced Tc in various applications. Such implantation-induced enhancement of Tc is expected certainly for other Fe-HTSCs and possibly also for other superconductors.[3]

References
[1] A. V. Felde; J. Fink; Th. M. Heinzerling; J. Pflüger; B. Scheerer; G. Linker; D. Kaletta Phys. Rev. Lett., 1984, 53, 922 https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.53.922.
[2] T. Ozaki; L. Wu; C. Zhang; J. Jaroszynski; W. Si; J. Zhou; Y. Zhu; Q. Li Nature Commun., 2016, 7, 13036 https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms13036.
[3] K. R. Sahu; T. Wolf; A. K. Mishra; A. Banerjee; V. Ganesan; U. De arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.03491, 2022.