Investigation of structure, specific heat and superconducting transition in Mg1-xAlxB2 (x∼0.5)

We have carried out structure, magnetic and specific heat measurements on aluminum doped magnetism diboride samples Mg1-xAlxB2 in order to investigate possible superconductivity at the x = 0.5 concentration. A diamagnetic signal was observed in magnetization measurements accompanied by a decrease in resistivity. However, the diamagnetic signal was extremely small as compared to what expected from full diamagnetism. Also, the transition both in magnetization and resistance was very broad. We propose that the diamagnetism is due to a very small amount of superconducting phase such as MgB2 and the resistive transition is due to the percolation behavior. Furthermore, we performed specific heat measurements, which are considered as a tool to investigate the bulk nature of superconducting transition, on the x = 0.5 sample to verify the existence of superconductivity. We observed no evident superconducting transition in the entire temperature region from 2 to 300 K. The undistinguishable data between 0 and 5 T magnetic fields also indicated the absence of bulk superconductivity in the x = 0.5 sample. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.