The yttrium barium copper oxide tape that is revolutionising fusion magnet design — enabling 20+ tesla fields at temperatures ten times warmer than legacy superconductors.
REBCO (Rare Earth Barium Copper Oxide) is a high-temperature superconducting (HTS) material, typically deposited as a thin film on a metal substrate to form a flexible tape. The full designation is REBa2Cu3O7-x, where RE is a rare earth element (usually yttrium, making it YBCO). REBCO tape carries supercurrent at temperatures up to 77 K (liquid nitrogen) and can generate magnetic fields exceeding 20 tesla — far beyond what legacy NbTi or Nb3Sn superconductors can achieve.[1]
A REBCO tape is typically 4–12 mm wide and ~0.1 mm thick, consisting of: a metal substrate (Hastelloy), buffer layers for crystal alignment (IBAD MgO), the REBCO superconducting layer (~1–3 μm), and protective layers (silver, copper). The superconductor must be grown with precise crystallographic alignment to carry high currents. Manufacturing is by pulsed laser deposition (PLD) or metal-organic chemical vapour deposition (MOCVD).[2]
Key REBCO tape producers include SuperPower (USA, owned by Furukawa), AMSC (USA), Fujikura (Japan), SuNam (South Korea), SuperOx (Russia), and Shanghai Superconductor Technology (China). Total global production capacity has grown rapidly from ~500 km/year in 2020 to several thousand km/year by 2025, driven largely by fusion demand.[3]