Exchange spring media for perpendicular recording -: art. no. 012504

A novel type of exchange spring media is proposed for magnetic recording systems consisting of a hard/soft bilayer. Finite element micromagnetic simulations show that the reversal modes induced by the external write field are significantly different from the thermally activated switching processes. Thus, the bilayers can be optimized in order to achieve a high thermal stability without increase of coercive field. In grains with identical size and coercivity an optimized bilayer reaches an energy barrier exceeding those of optimized single phase media by more than a factor of two. Additionally the lower angular dependence of coercivity of exchange spring media will improve the signal to noise ratio. (c) 2005 American Institute of Physics.