Measuring irradiation effects on commercial superconducting tapes for fusion reactors

Superconducting magnets inside a fusion reactor will experience conditions that aren’t seen anywhere on Earth. This creates serious challenges in developing materials that will be used in future fusion reactors. Over the last decade 2nd generation (2G) High Temperature Superconducting (HTS) tape became one of the most promising superconducting materials which could significantly improve the performance of superconducting magnets that are expected to be used in the advanced fusion reactors. We propose to measure the magnetic penetration depth in commercial “pristine” and “irradiated” 2G HTS tapes as a function of temperature using the MuSR instrument. This will provide important information about the effect of irradiation on the superconducting properties of HTS tapes.