Domain wall assisted magnetic recording (invited)

The domain wall assisted switching in the hard/soft composite nanostructures is studied using numerical and analytic micromagnetics. The switching occurs via domain wall nucleation, compression in the applied field, depinning, and propagation through the hard/soft interface. Optimizing hard and soft layer parameters yields a significant increase of the maximum switchable anisotropy for a fixed applied field, and hence an enhancement of the energy barrier that can be translated into grain diameter reduction and magnetic recording density gains. The switching fields for the media with quadratic variation of the anisotropy were calculated and optimized to achieve the largest energy barrier gain. Domain wall assisted switching was studied in the field of a single pole write head. (c) 2007 American Institute of Physics.