Following the procedures of basic experiments A1–A3 of the Materials Science Experiments (Inorganic) course, you make a sintered body of YBa2Cu3O7−δ from Y2O3, BaCO3 and CuO powders, cool it with liquid nitrogen, and place a magnet on top of it to see how it levitates. In ① you carry a single sample all the way from weighing through sintering and oxygenation, polishing and bulk density, to four-probe resistance measurement, and follow the phase changes, the densification and the loss and uptake of oxygen (δ) through diagrams of the interior and numerical readouts. In ② you cool the sample from ① or a ready-made sample and, as in the lab manual, place a magnet on top of it; flux diagrams and force graphs show the difference between zero-field cooling and field cooling and what happens when the sample is warmed. In ③ you compare how superconductors other than YBCO (GdBCO, Bi-2223) levitate with the same magnet at the same temperature.
Mochizuki Research Group, Tokyo University of Science | Procedures, reagent amounts, temperatures and times follow the 2025 edition of the lab manual for Materials Science Experiments (Inorganic Materials) of the former Tokyo Institute of Technology (§5, §6.1–6.6) and the lab videos (A1–A3). Heat treatments are done in air (as specified by the instructor in charge, 2026-09-25). Values that appear in neither the manual nor the videos (the amount of powder used for pressing, the amount of ethanol, the amount removed by polishing, the cooling after calcination, and the material and dimensions of the magnet), and the duration of dry mixing (3 min), which appears only in the video with no time shown, are provisional. The rate equations for the synthesis are carried over from estimates in VEL (the virtual laboratory, in preparation) and are not fits to measurements. The levitation force comes from a schematic educational model of our own (the numbers are only order-of-magnitude guides). Details and sources are given on the explanation page (in Japanese). For the principles of superconductivity, see superconductivity-simulator-en.html and cooper-pair-simulator-en.html. Back to: Mochizuki Research Group Education — Inorganic Materials Science > Virtual Experiments / Inorganic Materials Science resources