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In this paper, magnetic and structural properties of near-equiatomic CoPt thin films, which exhibited a high coercivity in the film-normal direction-suitable for perpendicular magnetic recording media applications-are reported. The films exhibited a larger coercivity of about 6.5 kOe at 8 nm. The coercivity showed a monotonous decrease as the film thickness was increased. The transmission electron microscopy images indicated that the as fabricated CoPt film generally consists of a stack of magnetically hard hexagonal-close-packed phase, followed by stacking faults and face-centred-cubic phase. The thickness dependent magnetic properties are explained on the basis of exchange-coupled composite media. Epitaxial growth on Ru layers is a possible factor leading to the unusual observation of magnetically hard hcp-phase at high concentrations of Pt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perpendicular recording media technology faces limitation in the writability of media with high anisotropy. Therefore, alternative methods are sought to overcome this problem. Heat-assisted magnetic recording may give rise to high areal densities, but the technological process will take time. We have studied methods to improve the writability in perpendicular recording media using crystalline soft underlayer (C-SUL) materials with fcc(111) texture. One of the recording media designs consists of a simple insertion of C-SUL material between the nonmagnetic intermediate layers, thus providing a path for magnetic flux during the writing. In the alternative methods, part of the nonmagnetic intermediate layer material was replaced with C-SUL material. Overwrite improvement was observed in both the cases, indicating that the C-SUL material will play a major role in improving writability in recording media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]