SINGLE-DOMAIN MAGNETIC PILLAR ARRAY OF 35-NM DIAMETER AND 65-GBITS/IN(2) DENSITY FOR ULTRAHIGH DENSITY QUANTUM MAGNETIC STORAGE

Using electron beam nanolithography and electroplating, arrays of Ni pillars on silicon that have a uniform diameter of 35 nm, a height of 120 nm, and a period of 100 nm were fabricated. The density of the pillar arrays is 65 Gbits/in.2 - over two orders of magnitude greater than the state-of-the-art magnetic storage density. Because of their nanoscale size, shape anisotropy, and separation from each other, each Ni pillar is single domain with only two quantized perpendicular magnetization states: up and down. Each pillar can be used to store one bit of information, therefore such nanomagnetic pillar array storage offers a rather different paradigm than the conventional storage method. A quantum magnetic disk scheme that is based on uniformly embedding single-domain magnetic structures in a nonmagnetic disk is proposed.