Magnetic Field Penetration Technique to Study Field Shielding of Multilayered Superconductors

The SIS structure which consists of alternative thin layers of superconductors and insulators on a bulk niobium has been proposed to shield niobium cavity surface from high magnetic field and hence increase the accelerating gradient. The study of the behavior of multilayer superconductors in an external magnetic field is essential to optimize their SRF performance. In this work we report the development of a simple and efficient technique to measure penetration of magnetic field into bulk, thin film and multilayer superconductors. Experimental setup contains a small superconducting solenoid which can produce a parallel surface magnetic field up to 0.5 T and Hall probes to detect penetrated magnetic field across the superconduct- ing sample. This system was calibrated and used to study the effect of niobium sample thickness on the field of full magnetic flux penetration. We determined the optimum thickness of the niobium substrate to fabricate the multi-layer structure for the measurements in our setup. This technique was used to measure penetration fields of Nb3Sn thin films and Nb3Sn/Al2O3 multilayers deposited on Al2O3 wafers. The system was optimized to mitigate thermo- magnetic flux jumps at low temperatures