The new rare-earth arsenate superconductors are layered, low carrier density compounds with many similarities to the high-Tc cuprates. An important question is whether they also exhibit weak-coupling across randomly oriented grain-boundaries. In this work we show considerable evidence for such weak-coupling by study of the dependence of magnetization in bulk and powdered samples. Bulk sample magnetization curves show very little hysteresis while remanent magnetization shows almost no sample size dependence, even after powdering. We conclude that these samples exhibit substantial electromagnetic granularity on a scale approximating the grain size, though we cannot yet determine whether this is intrinsic or extrinsic.
@article{arxiv.0805.1282,
title = {Evidence for electromagnetic granularity in the polycrystalline iron-based superconductor LaO0.89F0.11FeAs},
author = {A. Yamamoto and J. Jiang and C. Tarantini and N. Craig and A. A. Polyanskii and F. Kametani and F. Hunte and J. Jaroszynski and E. E. Hellstrom and D. C. Larbalestier and R. Jin and A. S. Sefat and M. A. McGuire and B. C. Sales and D. K. Christen and D. Mandrus},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0805.1282},
year = {2008}
}