Iron based superconductors processing and properties

The discovery of iron based superconductors in early 2008 stimulated the interest of researchers around the globe, including physicists, chemists and materials scientists leading to publication of more than 4000 papers on this superconductor since then. Since the major player in the superconductor is iron, which had long been believed to be the worst element suited for the superconductivity, this discovery gave tremendous impact on the superconductivity research. Furthermore, this material has favourable characteristics for practical applications such as a relatively high critical temperature, high upper critical field and high critical current density with low anisotropy. In the last 3 years, many derived superconducting materials have been discovered and several theoretical models for the mechanism of superconductivity have been proposed. In this review, the research topics on iron based superconductors are summarised from the viewpoint of materials science.