SRF MULTILAYER STRUCTURES BASED ON NBTIN

Abstract

For the past three decades, bulk niobium has been the material of choice for SRF cavities applications. In the recent years, RF cavities performances have approached the theoretical limit for bulk niobium. For further improvement of RF cavity performance for future accelerator projects, an interesting alternative has been recently proposed by Alex Gurevich with the Superconductor-Insulator-Superconductor multilayer approach, using the benefit of the higher critical field Hc2 of higher-Tc superconductors without being limited with their lower Hc1. JLab is pursuing this approach with the development of multilayer structures based on NbTiN via magnetron sputtering and High Power Impulse Magnetron Sputtering (HiPIMS). Insulators such as, AlN, Al2O3 and MgO are being investigated as candidates for the insulator layers. This paper present the preliminary results on the characteristics of NbTiN and insulator layers and a first attempt of a NbTiN-based multilayer structure on bulk Nb and thick Nb films.