A HAMR Media Technology Roadmap to an Areal Density of 4 Tb/in^2.

This paper discusses heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) media requirements and challenges for areal densities (AD) beyond 1~\Tb/in^2. Based on recent roadmap discussions the focus is primarily on granular chemically ordered L1_0 FePtX-Y-perpendicular media with reduced average grain size down to \langleD\rangle=3\-5~\nm relative to current CoCrPt based perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) media with average grain size \langleD\rangle=7\-9~\nm. In HAMR media the combination of thermal conductivity and Curie temperature TC determines the required laser power during recording. Key challenges are sigma variations of D and TC which need to be reduced to \sigmaD/\rm D\sim 10\-15\% and \sigmaTC/\rm TC\sim 2\%. In addition AD is limited by switching field distribution (SFD) and thermal spot size. The key goal going forward is to optimize heads, media, head-media-spacing (HMS) and read-back channel technologies to extend AD to 4~\Tb/in^2 and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]