RIA: New high moment soft magnetic multilayers & their applications in sub-half micron track width magnetic recording

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9409805 Wang Magnetic disk drives are the dominant mass storage devices for computers. In order to meet the storage demand for image processing, massively parallel computing and multimedia, the areal recording densities of the disk drives need to be raised from currently 200 Megabits/inch2 to beyond 10 Gigabits/inch2, an increase of about two orders of magnitude. To reach this goal, a key technology for designing and fabricating high moment, submicron trackwidth, magnetic write heads are required to record digital bits with a size of about 0.1 um x 0.5 um on high coercivity magnetic disks which cannot be recorded with conventional Pemalloy magnetic heads. The objectives and methods of the project are as follows; 1) Grow giant moment a" phase Fe16N2 films on ceramic substrates by reactively sputtering and Fe target in Ar + N2 + NH3 plasma, with controlled in-situ substrate temperatures. The effects of growth parameters and substrates on the phases, microstructures, and magnetic properties of the films obtained will be explored. 2) Fabricate magnetic write heads with the new material, and with a trackwidth 0.5 um. Electron-beam lithography and reactive ion beam etching will be used to fabricate submicron magnetic structures. 3) Investigate magnetic domain structures of such heads with magnetic force microscopy (MFM) and scanning electron microscopy with spin analysis (SEMPA). Recording performance will be evaluated with industrial collaboration. ***