Effects of electron irradiation on YBa[Formula: see text]CU[Formula: see text]0[Formula: see text] superconductor

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Abstract
We have irradiated YBa2Cu3O7-δ single crystals with electrons of energy E ranging from 0.1 to 2.4 MeV. From the measurements of the Tc, reduction rate, $-Delta dot{T}_{ m c}=-{ m d}(Delta T_{ m c})/{ m d}(Phi t)$ with Φt the irradiation fluence, we have clearly evidenced for the first time the influence of both copper and oxygen defects on the critical temperature. The analysis of the data, using calculated displacement cross-sections, allows us to extract the values of the displacement threshold energy for oxygen and copper atoms that we have evaluated as 10 and 15 eV respectively. We clearly show that irradiation effects have nothing to do with oxygen removal effects. However, the irradiation induced Tc, decrease seems to be due to a pair breaking effect as suggested for Zn doped YBa2Cu3O7-δ samples. On this subject, we bring experimental evidence which shows that the “classical” Abrikosov-Gorkov depairing mechanism by magnetic impurities is not appropriate to explain either the irradiation effects or the Zn substitution ones.

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