The relationship between thermal decay rate, thermal stability factor KuV/KBT and grain size distribution in thin film magnetic recording media

In this paper we study the relationship between thermal decay of signal, thermal decay factor KuV/kT and the grain size distributions. The signal decay rate is correlated with the thermal stability factor KuV/kT. A linear relationship was found between the signal decay rate and the parameter c,, which represents the contributions from g-rains with low KuV/kT values. The KuV/kT distributions correlated with the grain size distributions. However the KuV/kT distributions are more concentrated than the grain size distributions due to the effects of exchange coupling, magnetostatic interaction, stacking fault and c-axis orientation distribution. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.