ESTIMATING THE THERMAL-CONDUCTIVITY OF MAGNETOOPTICAL RECORDING MEDIA

A method is presented for estimating the thermal conductivity of magneto-optical recording media by using the temperature dependence of their Kerr effect. The temperature distribution of a recording layer observed as the distribution of polarized light intensity is used to estimate the thermal conductivity of the recording media. The thermal conductivity of a TbFeCo film is between 0.08 and 0.18 W/cm degrees-C, and the conductivity of an SiN film is < 0.04 W/cm degrees-C. Although these values are lower than the previously reported values, the performance parameters that we estimated by using them agree closely with the experimentally measured parameters. The proposed method thus seems valuable for quantitatively analyzing the thermal properties of magneto-optical recording media.