The relationship between thermal decay rate, thermal stability factor KuV/KBT and grain size distribution in thin film magnetic recording media

Abstract In this paper we study the relationship between thermal decay of signal, thermal decay factor K u V / kT and the grain size distributions. The signal decay rate is correlated with the thermal stability factor K u V / kT . A linear relationship was found between the signal decay rate and the parameter c s , which represents the contributions from grains with low K u V / kT values. The K u V / kT distributions correlated with the grain size distributions. However the K u V / kT distributions are more concentrated than the grain size distributions due to the effects of exchange coupling, magnetostatic interaction, stacking fault and c -axis orientation distribution.