Fabrication of cube-textured Ag-buffered Ni substrates by electro-epitaxial deposition

Cube-textured silver buffer layers have been fabricated using the easily scalable technique of electro-epitaxial deposition. Continuous 150 nm thick silver films with in-plane FWHM values of 8deg; have been epitaxially deposited directly onto cube-textured Ni, Ni-10 wt% Cr and NiFe substrates using no intermediate buffer layer and no post-deposition heat treatment. Studies of the thermal stability of the coatings show that the texture is stable up to 900 °C and that continuous films are retained up to 800 °C. We believe that electro-epitaxial deposition offers a promising method for the fabrication of low-cost, long length biaxially textured substrates for superconducting tape.