The superconducting material, once shot with a powerful laser inside the vacuum, immediately turns into a plasma plume and hovers up. This method is used for thin film deposition on compatible substrate. In our case, we're using nickel as our substrate and that we need to heat up to 800 ºC to complete the thin film deposition with the YBCO.

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Heating inside of a vacuum chamber proved to be a larger problem than predicted,  as only means of heat transfer is conduction. Since we heat up the heatbed using nichrome wire, the problem becomes that we need to somehow insulate electricity but conduct heat in the system.

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Our solution arose after breaking into a 3D printer heating pin, in which we saw powder. Manufacturing the heat bed in the form of a die, we were able to use a hydraulic press to encapsulate the nichrome wire inside alumina powder, which is a material that conducts heats but not electricity.

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We used glass rods to connect the heat bed to the chamber, as aluminum's melting temperature is at 600 ºC. Glass is a material that can have very large temperature gradients. This works in out favor, as aluminum has high thermal conductivity, it can dissipate heat without reaching very high temperatures.​

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Ongoing project...