HTS tape is the thin, flexible, steel-backed ribbon coated with a film of high-temperature superconductor from which high-field 📝fusion magnets are wound.
The tape is the practical answer to an awkward fact: 📝REBCO, the 📝superconductor that performs at 20-tesla fields, is a brittle ceramic that cannot be drawn into round wire the way niobium alloys can. Instead it is built up in layers — a coated conductor. A flexible high-strength metal substrate carries thin buffer layers that template the crystal structure, a superconducting REBCO film a few micrometers thick grows on top, and silver and copper layers cap the stack for electrical protection. The finished ribbon is a fraction of a millimeter thick and a few millimeters wide, and nearly all of its current flows in the micrometers-thin ceramic film.
The near-neighbor distinction is between the tape and the cable: single tapes are stacked or twisted into high-current cables, which are then wound into the coils of 📝High-Temperature Superconducting (HTS) Magnets. A single fusion-scale magnet consumes kilometers of tape, which is why tape manufacturing capacity is a gating resource for the fusion industry.