Composite media (dynamic tilted media) for magnetic recording

We designed and fabricated a composite magnetic recording medium with exchange decoupled magnetic grains that consist of two vertically exchange-coupled magnetic regions (one is magnetically soft and one is magnetically hard) as an approach to alleviate the writing field limitation of perpendicular magnetic recording heads. A nonmagnetic layer with different thickness was put between the hard and soft layer to tune the exchange coupling. With proper coupling, significant drop of the coercivity field was observed for this composite medium while still maintaining good thermal stability. Better recording performance was obtained for such medium compared to perpendicular and longitudinal medium. The results have proved the possibility of fabricating a writable recording medium having an ultrahigh magnetic anisotropy constant (K-u) value. (C) 2005 American Institute of Physics.