Magnetic recording medium with improved temporal stability

The current effort to fabricate nonvolatile magnetic recording media with a high areal density is deteriorated by the increasing temporal instability of the stored information. If the stored energy per magnetic particle competes with the thermal energy, spontaneous magnetic reversal processes may occur. Deposition of the magnetic particles on top of an antiferromagnetic substrate will increase its energy barrier due to the exchange coupling between the two subsystems. For this, the magnetic moments of the antiferromagnet in the vicinity of the magnetic particle have to deviate from their undisturbed arrangement. This disturbance vanishes within a few lattice constants. In the framework of a classical spin model, we calculate the spin arrangements and the resulting energy barriers for typical systems. (C) 2001 American Institute of Physics.