Investigation of coercive squareness in TbFeCo films

TbFeCo is one of the most promising magnetooptical recording media because it shows a high uniaxial anisotropy and a fairly good Kerr effect, and its composition can be tailored to achieve a large room temperature coercivity. A basic study was carried out to determine the factors affecting the mechanisms of magnetization reversal and the regularity of domain growth at room temperature in TbFeCo films. A technique has been established to quantify the regularity of domain growth in terms of coercive squareness. It has been observed that intrinsic magnetization and uniaxial anisotropy are the two most significant parameters to affect coercive squareness. Deposition processes and conditions have a very slight influence on coercive squareness.<>     

Data storage in 2000-trends in data storage technologies

Recent projections by experts in computer systems and semiconductor technology indicate that in the year 2000, personal computers will have a processing speed of 100 million instructions per second and a semiconductor RAM capacity of 1 Gbyte. To work with such a system, data storage devices will need to provide more than 10 Gbytes of capacity and a data rate of 100 Mbyte/s. The advances required by magnetic and magnetooptical disk drives to meet these requirements are examined. Plausible system configurations for achieving these goals are described. A magnetic disk drive utilizing eight 3.5-in. disks on one spindle appears to be a possible configuration. Because of a larger areal density, a magnetooptical disk drive could meet the capacity requirements with only a single 3.5-in. disk. On the other hand, achieving the 100-Mbyte/s data rate and access times comparable to those of magnetic disk systems will require some technological breakthroughs. Without these breakthroughs and assuming magnetic disk progress as expected, magnetooptical disks are expected to provide many of the functions which floppy disks provide today-transfer of programs and databases between systems and economical offline storage     

High frequency dynamic imaging of domains in thin film heads

A wide-field magnetooptic domain observation system with a time resolution of 10 ns has been developed to study magnetization dynamics in thin-film heads. The instantaneous dynamic response on the top yoke of thin-film recording heads is examined at any chosen instant within the drive current cycle at frequencies up to 20 MHz. Different phase responses from different domain walls in the head are observed and interpreted in terms of hysteretic wall motion, effective field density variation in the head, and wall orientations relative to the flux conduction direction. Two different flux conduction mechanisms associated with two different domain structures in the central region of the head are observed and discussed. Flux conduction in the center of the head by motion of backgap walls and magnetization rotation for domain structures with and without the backgap walls was observed. The domain structure with the backgap walls is probably undesirable because the backgap wall motion may cause a decrease in head efficiency during high-frequency operation and could cause noise during read-back     

Temperature dependent magnetic properties of barium-ferritethin-film recording media

Temperature dependencies of magnetic properties were measured in barium-ferrite thin films with grains having in-plane aligned as well as randomly oriented easy axes. The temperature dependence of H_c was shown to be similar to that of the effective anisotropy field, which is determined by the crystalline and shape anisotropies. The measured H _c values in the easy-axis aligned and randomly oriented films are significantly smaller than those predicted by the Stoner-Wohlfarth (SW) coherent rotation model. Such discrepancies are believed to be caused by incoherent rotation. Deviations from the SW model were also found within a wide temperature range in the angular dependence of coercivity and remanent coercivity, the field dependence of torque and rotational hysteresis. These led to the conclusion that temperature has only weak affects on the rotation mode of the magnetization. The discrepancies between the thermal activation volume and the grain size which were found previously at room temperature, and were believed to be yet another signature of incoherent rotation, were shown to also exist at a low temperature of 173 K     

Thin-film head domain structures versus Permalloy composition:strain determination and frequency response

The influence of the composition of plated Permalloy on the resulting magnetic domain structure in the upper yoke of inductive thin-film magnetic recording heads has been investigated. The response of the magnetization from four otherwise similar thin-film heads, ranging in iron content from 18 to 21% by weight, has been imaged by means of a scanning magnetooptic photometer. Radially compressive (and/or circumferentially tensile) strain is shown to exist in each of these heads about the rear magnetic closure, yielding a transition from radial to circumferential domain structures across the range of compositions. Mechanisms for the conduction of magnetic flux in each of these structures are demonstrated at 1 and 20 MHz     

Major-minor loop, single-level-masking bubble chip

A major-minor loop chip design is presented which requires one high resolution masking step and no critical mask alignments. This design may therefore be implemented with electron-beam, X-ray, or deep-UV conformable-contact lithography to define the submicron linewidths required in ultra-high density devices. Chips with 20-μm period were fabricated with a layered Au-first, NiFe-second structure in a design which provided 6 percent overall margins; substitution of an improved merge component would allow a 10 percent margin overlap of all functions. Tests of components with 8 μm periods show margins of similar percentage values. Current requirements for the devices are low (10 mA for 8 μm period) so that the designs appear extendable to much higher densities.     

On spontaneous nucleation in field-accessed bubble devices

The dependence ot the in-plane drive field at which bubble domains spontaneously nucleate in field-accessed bubble devices has been investigated as a function ofH_{k} - 4piM_{s}and of spacer thickness between the bubble film and permalloy propagation elements. The experiments were carried out on amorphous GdCoMo bubble films with T-bar and Y-bar structures. For a given structure and spacer thickness the nucleation field increases linearly withH_{k} - 4piM. Larger spacer thicknesses also lead to increased nucleation fields. A model based on the Stoner-Wohlfarth astroid is compared to these data and found to be useful in explaining the qualitative trends, but to be in poor quantitative agreement. It is concluded that since the drive field required in a device is proportional to4piM_{s}, Q - 1 = (H_{k} - 4piM_{s})/4piM_{s}must be greater than some minimum value for a given device structure and spacer thickness to permit reliable device operation.     

Low Fatigue in Epitaxial Pb(Zr<Subscript>0.2</Subscript>Ti<Subscript>0.8</Subscript>)O<Subscript>3</Subscript> on Si Substrates with LaNiO<Subscript>3</Subscript> Electrodes by RF Sputtering

Epitaxial PZT (001) thin films with a LaNiO₃ bottom electrode were deposited by radio-frequency (RF) sputtering onto Si(001) single-crystal substrates with SrTiO₃/TiN buffer layers. Pb(Zr_0.2Ti_0.8)O₃ (PZT) samples were shown to consist of a single perovskite phase and to have an (001) orientation. The orientation relationship was determined to be PZT(001)[110]∥LaNiO₃(001)[110]∥SrTiO₃ (001)[110]∥TiN(001)[110]∥Si(001)[110]. Atomic force microscope (AFM) measurements showed the PZT films to have smooth surfaces with a roughness of 1.15 nm. The microstructure of the multilayer was studied using transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Electrical measurements were conducted using both Pt and LaNiO₃ as top electrodes. The measured remanent polarization P _r and coercive field E _c of the PZT thin film with Pt top electrodes were 23 μC/cm² and 75 kV/cm, and were 25 μC/cm² and 60 kV/cm for the PZT film with LaNiO₃ top electrodes. No obvious fatigue after 10¹⁰ switching cycles indicated good electrical endurance of the PZT films using LaNiO₃ electrodes, compared with the PZT film with Pt top electrodes showing a significant polarization loss after 10⁸ cycles. These PZT films with LaNiO₃ electrodes could be potential recording media for probe-based high-density data storage.     

The magnetic moment of CrO2fine particles

Commercially available, reductively stabilized CrO2particles have a saturation moment of about 80 emu/g or about 80% of the theoretical maximum (100 emu/g) when extrapolated to infinite field. A reduction process used to stabilize the moment accounts for about 10 emu/g or 10% of the difference from the theoretical. The remaining 10 emu/g or 10% difference from the theoretical moment appears to be due to an effectively non-magnetic surface layer. Spin canting, which was previously suggested to cause the reduction, does not appear to be responsible. In addition, supermagnetism was found in batches of very small particles. For example, 48 m²/g CrO2particles (< 150 Å diameter with an aspect ratio of 10) contained about 20% superparamagnetic particles.