Simulation and Analysis of Co-Pt Based Granular Magnetic Recording Media Near the Curie Temperature

Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) has been shown to satisfy modern data storage of hard disk drives by enabling the writing of high-anisotropy materials such as Fe-Pt. Modelling the magnetization dynamics near the Curie temperature (Tc) is crucial when predicting the limits of HAMR or any technology that relies on fast, high temperature magnetization control. However, there are some differences in how magnetic grains behave under conditions important to HAMR, such as cooling rate and magnetic field angle. Such differences arise from how thermal fluctuations are modeled in the stochastic Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation. Therefore, it is important to benchmark these results against experiments to validate theoretical models. Here, we model the switching probability of granular Co-Pt media with VAMPIRE’s atomistic simulator as preparation for experiments. Unlike Fe-Pt, Co-Pt thin-films serve as a good benchmark due to their tunable composition, allowing us to generously change parameters like saturation magnetization, anisotropy and Tc.