A cold-seeding method for fabricating LRE-based (LRE: a light rare-earth
element) bulk superconductors under a reduced oxygen atmosphere is reported.
We used Sm123/MgO thin films as seed crystals, and succeeded in growing
c-axis oriented single
grains for both LRE = Gd and LRE = Sm. Although a slight contamination of Mg from the seed crystal was detected,
high quality bulk superconductors with diameters of 30 mm were successfully
fabricated under low oxygen partial pressure. In particular, the trapped field of
the Sm-based bulk superconductor was 1.52 T at liquid nitrogen temperature.