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Fluorine-doped Fe(Se, Te) has been successfully synthesized using the melting method. A dual-oscillation effect was found in the F-doped sample, which combined both microstructural oscillation and chemical compositional oscillation. The microstructural oscillation could be attributed to alternate growth of tetragonal β-Fe(Se, Te) and hexagonal δ-Fe(Se, Te), which formed a pearlite-like structure and led to the enhancement of δ l flux pinning due to the alternating distributed nonsuperconducting δ-Fe(Se, Te) phase. The chemical compositional oscillations in β-Fe(Se, Te) phase were because of the inhomogeneously distributed Se and Te, which changes the pinning mechanism from surface pinning in the undoped sample to Δκ pinning in the 5% F-doped one. As a result, the critical current, upper critical field, and thermally activated flux-flow activation energy of FeSe0.45Te0.5F0.05 were enhanced by 7, 2, and 3 times, respectively. Our work revealed the physical insights into F-doping resulting in high-performance Fe(Se, Te) superconductors and inspired a new approach to optimize superconductivities in iron-based superconductors through phase and element manipulations.

The investigations into the interfaces in iron selenide (FeSe) thin films on various substrates have manifested the great potential of showing high-temperature-superconductivity in this unique system. In present work, we obtain FeSe thin films with a series of thicknesses on calcium fluoride (CaF2) (100) substrates and glean the detailed information from the FeSe/CaF2 interface by using scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM). Intriguingly, we have found the universal existence of a calcium selenide (CaSe) interlayer with a thickness of approximate 3 nm between FeSe and CaF2 in all the samples, which is irrelevant to the thickness of FeSe layers. A slight Se deficiency occurs in the FeSe layer due to the formation of CaSe interlayer. This Se deficiency is generally negligible except for the case of the ultrathin FeSe film (8 nm in thickness), in which the stoichiometric deviation from FeSe is big enough to suppress the superconductivity. Meanwhile, in the overly thick FeSe layer (160 nm in thickn...