Fabrication of highly balanced directly coupled YBa2Cu3Oy gradiometers and their noise properties in an unshielded environment

We fabricated directly coupled gradiometers made of YBa2Cu3Oy thin films on bicrystal substrates. The parasitic effective area of the gradiometric pickup coil was found to be comparable with that of the superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) in each gradiometer. A gradiometer balance of below 10−3 was achieved by selecting the coupling direction of the SQUID so as to cancel the parasitic effective area of the pickup coil by the effective area of the SQUID itself. The noise of the gradiometers measured in an unshielded environment decreased in proportion to the improvement in the gradiometer balance; however, the noise of the gradiometer with a balance of 0.03% was limited by the gradient-field component of the environmental noise.