Issues in heat-assisted perpendicular recording

Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) has emerged in the past few years as one of the leading candidates to carry magnetic data storage toward areal densities of 1 Tb/in/sup 2/ and perhaps well beyond. The use of thermal-assistance for writing very high anisotropy magnetic media is a natural means of continuing the decades-old paradigm for scaling upward the storage density capability of particulate magnetic films. This approach appears to be fully compatible with extension of the performance of perpendicular recording well beyond its expected limits using ambient temperature recording. Recent developments indicate that HAMR may take advantage of thermal energy imparted in the recording process to achieve extremely fast magnetic switching without the need for inordinately high writing head fields, thus enabling performance advances.