Investigations of Magnetic Nanostructures for Patterned Media

Magnetic recording technology, in the form of hard disk drives, has completed more than five decades of their presence. Continuing increases in areal density of hard disk drives will be limited by superparamagnetic effect. To address this problem, bit patterned media (BPM) is considered as one of the most promising candidates to enable recording densities increase up to 1 Tbit per square inch. However BPM is not without issues either. One of the fundamental issues associated with BPM is the element to element variation in intrinsic magnetic properties resulting in the widening of switching field distributions (SFD).Therefore, the main focus of this work is trying to understand and minimize the SFD of BPM. For this objective, two approaches such as: Antiferromagnetically coupled (AFC) patterned media and Capped bit patterned media (CBPM) are employed to minimize the SFD of patterned islands. It was observed that both approaches open a new pathway to reduce SFD of patterned structures by optimizing magnetic layer structures and a proper fabrication technique.