Anisotropy is of great value in the creation of high-temperature superconductors. A lot of low-temperature physics is performed on materials consisting of thin films, often manufactured through vacuum deposition of material onto a substrate or through lithography. The reason this is important relates to the Meissner effect, which, at the point of its breakdown at the high-magnetic-field limit, becomes a series of quantized magnetic-field vortices penetrating the superconducting material, and coupling very strongly to anisotropies in the material, such as crystalline breaks or lithographed impurities.