Press Release 2010
Development of FePt perpendicular magnetic recording media for thermally-assisted magnetic recording (TAMR)
Dr. Kazuhiro Hono
(Magnetic Materials Center / NIMS, Managing Director)
(Magnetic Materials Center / NIMS, Managing Director)
Dr. Kazuhiro Hono, Managing Director of the Magnetic Materials Center at the National Institute for Materials Science (President: Sukekatsu Ushioda), together with Dr. Yukiko Takahashi, Senior Researcher, and Dr. Li Zhang, Postdoctoral Fellow have succeeded in fabricating perpendicular magnetic films with extremely high coercivity (37 kOe), in which the nano-particles of an iron-platinum (FePt) alloy are densely dispersed with a very small size distribution. Using these films, Dr. Barry C. Stipe and Dr. Michael Grobis at the San Jose Research Center of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) have shown that thermally assisted magnetic recording with an areal density of 450 Gbit/in2 is possible. This value is comparable to the highest area densities achieved with the conventional perpendicular magnetic recording method used in current hard disk drives (HDD) and is the highest for thermally assisted magnetic recording (TAMR). This collaborative research has demonstrated the feasibility of high density TAMR on high coercivity FePt based perpendicular magnetic films, which has been proposed as one of thepromising next-generation ultra-high density magnetic recording system.