Templated Growth of Magnetic Recording Media

Current and potential next-generation magnetic recording technologies are based on the writing and reading of bits on a magnetic thin film with a granular microstructure, with grains of the magnetic material surrounded by an amorphous segregant. In order to realize the highest achievable data storage capabilities, there is a need for better control of the magnetic media microstructure, particularly in terms of minimizing grain size and grain boundary thickness distributions. In this work, a guided magnetic media growth is attempted by creating a pre-fabricated template with a specific material and morphology. The template is designed in such a way that, when magnetic media consisting of the magnetic alloy and segregant are sputtered, the sites on the template result in a controlled two-phase growth of magnetic media. The template is fabricated using self-assembling block copolymers, which can be used to fabricate nanostructures with a regular hexagonal lattice of spheres of one block in the other’s matrix. These are then used as etch-masks to fabricate the template. In this thesis, we describe the approach used to fabricate these templates and demonstrate the two-phase growth of magnetic recording media. In such an approach, the magnetic grain size is defined by the uniform pitch of the block copolymer pattern, resulting in a uniform microstructure with much better grain size distribution than can be obtained with conventional un-templated media growth. The templated growth technique is also a suitable additive technique for the fabrication of Bit Patterned Media, another potential next-generation technology wherein the magnetic bits are isolated patterned islands. Combining nanoimprint lithography with templated growth, we can generate a long range spatially ordered array of magnetic islands with no etching of the magnetic material.