Biblio

We report on the significant enhancement of perpendicular magnetic anisotropy of Ni/NiO multilayers after mild annealing up to 90 min at 250 °C. Transmission electron microscopy shows that after annealing, a partial crystallization of the initially amorphous NiO layers occurs. This turns out to be the source of the anisotropy enhancement. Magnetic measurements reveal that even multilayers with Ni layers as thick as 7 nm, which in the as-deposited state showed inplane anisotropy with square hysteresis loops, show reduced in-plane remanence after thermal treatment. Hysteresis loops recorded with the field in the normal-to-film-plane direction provide evidence for perpendicular magnetic anisotropy with up and down magnetic domains at remanence. A plot of effective uniaxial magnetic anisotropy constant times individual Ni layer thickness as a function of individual Ni layer thickness shows a large change in the slope of the data attributed to a drastic change of volume anisotropy. Surface anisotropy showed a small decrease because of some layer roughening introduced by annealing.

The relationship between integrated media noise power and linear density in heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) is discussed. A noise plateau for intermediate recording density has been observed in HAMR, similar to that found in perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR). Here, we show, by changing the temperature profile of the heat spot in HAMR, that we can tune the noise plateau regions to different recording densities. The heat spot with sharp temperature gradient favors a plateau at high recording density, while the heat spot with gradual temperature gradient favors a plateau at low recording density. This effect is argued to be a consequence of the competition between transition noise and remanence noise in HAMR.