Measurement of Curie temperature distribution relevant to heat assisted magnetic recording

Abstract

Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) is a likely successor of Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) in the Hard disk drive industry. In PMR, recording performance is strongly affected by the following distributions in magnetic granular media: magnetic anisotropy field (HK), volume/grain size, and interaction field from neighboring grains. Since HAMR writing occurs in a narrow temperature region below Curie point (Tc), additional grain-to-grain Tc variation would strongly affect HAMR recording performance. Thus, Tc distribution should be examined for successful HAMR media development. In this paper, we demonstrate a new approach of extracting HK and Tc distributions (σHK and σTc) from thermo-remanence measurements. During the measurement process, a thin film is magnetically saturated, laser heated to specific peak temperature (for a time typically of 5 μs), then cooled to room temperature and magnetic thermo-remanence is measured. Analytical fit to the experimental curves enables independent evaluation of both σTc (±0.5% absolute) and σHK (±2% absolute). Parameters of the analytical statistical model include: temperature dependencies Ms(T), HK(T); mean field effective demagnetization factor N; grain size, HK; and Tc distributions. Thermal fluctuations are taken into account using Arrhenius-Neel formalism. Here, we report experimental σTc values as a function of grain volume. Increase of σTc with grain size reduction might be a limiting factor for HAMR extendibility.