Browsing by Subject "Heat assisted magnetic recording"

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    FePt based advanced magnetic recording media
    (2013-02) Wang, Hao
    In future extremely high density magnetic recording, FePt is considered as a promising candidate for future recording media materials. In this thesis work, FePt media with composite structure have been systematically studied in the forms of both granular media and bit patterned media (BPM). Continuous FePt films with surface roughness of less than 0.3 nm are achieved in FePt hard magnetic films, exchanged coupled composite (ECC) films and graded films. Nanoimpriting and block-copolymer lithography are employed to fabricate BPM. The switching field distribution (SFD) broadening and degradation of FePt BPM are studied. The reduction of SFD has been achieved using a post-annealing process. Both ECC and graded FePt BPM with sub-30 nm dot size have been experimentally demonstrated on large substrates for the first time. It is confirmed that the patterned graded BPM sample has smaller switching field and larger thermal energy barrier than the ECC sample does. Ultra-thin FePt granular media with graded composition was directly fabricated using a spontaneous layer diffusion process between the FePt and Pt layers during film deposition. A large gain factor of 3.74 was found in this spontaneously formed FePt graded granular media. A nanopatterning process, named as the Embedded Mask Patterning (EMP), is proposed and experimentally demonstrated based on the FePt magnetic recording media. In this process the granular structure is defined by a sputtering-deposited mask layer, while the magnetic properties are determined by the FePt continuous film. Grain size can be decreased by optimizing the mask layer only. A non-ideal surface anisotropy effect has been observed on the magnetization reversal process of both L10 phase FePt nanoparticles, and (001) textured L10 FePt thin film with island structure. The broken symmetry of the surface creates surface anisotropy and also weakens the exchange coupling. The elimination of the surface effect has been experimentally demonstrated by epitaxially capping a Pt layer on FePt. After being embedded in a Pt matrix, the exchange coupling between the surface portion and internal portion of FePt islands was enhanced.
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    Micromagnetic Study of Composite Media for High Density Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording
    (2017-06) Liu, Zengyuan
    The hard disk drive industry is a market with around 25 billion revenue each year. The annual average areal density growth rate is about 40% before 2012. With cloud computing and storage technology emerge, hard disk drives with high area density and low price are required. However, the areal density of current perpendicular magnetic recording technology tends to saturate at 1 Tb per square inch. Therefore, new technologies like Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) are needed. On the other hand, the Solid State Drive (SSD) has developed quickly as another candidate for high density and high speed information media which makes this situation urgent. In this thesis, micromagnetic simulations of HAMR media are conducted based on the renormalized Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert (LLG) method. L10 FePt is one promising recording media candidate for HAMR. The transition noise and transition jitter are calculated through magnetic recording simulation accelerated by GPU parallel computing. Thermal fluctuations and Curie temperature variance are verified to be two import noise sources for FePt recording media besides the grain size distribution and anisotropy variance. A more easily implemented method called thermal switching probability distribution (SPD) is proposed. It can provide two important factors for evaluating the recording performance: 𝜎𝑆𝑃𝐷 and write temperature. Under a certain fabrication technology (certain average grain size), the transition jitter can be estimated by 𝜎𝑆𝑃𝐷 . Furthermore, the grain volume dependence of 𝜎𝑆𝑃𝐷 and write temperature are investigated. The dependence follows 1 ⁄ 𝑉 and 1 ⁄ √𝑉 power law respectively. This knowledge greatly helps the noise analysis and new media design. To mitigate the noise from thermal fluctuations and Curie temperature variance, a new composite media design based on a bilayer structure with two different Curie temperatures is proposed. The substantial anisotropy of the write layer differentiates this design with respect to previous work. This ensures that the composite structure has small transition noise and high areal density. The user density can reach 3.4 Tb per square inch under traditional recording and 4.7 Tb per square inch with shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology. The interlayer exchange coupling effects are found to affect the energy barrier during the dynamic recording process. Both the thermal effects and write temperature can be tuned by optimizing the interlayer exchange coupling effects. Further research verified that this is due to the linear temperature dependence of energy barrier at temperatures close to Curie temperature. More research need to be done to offer a good explanation of the high areal density achieved by PMR-ECC-like structure for HAMR. Possible directions include the effective field temperature gradient and switching speed during the recording process as the temperature changes.