Modification of anisotropy in ultra-thin magnetic layers

Abstract

The areal density of modem magnetic storage stands somewhere between 200-300 Gb/in2. The scaling of current continuous medium technology is expected to reach a limit below 1 Tb/in2. Future technologies require discontinuous media in which magnetic islands are used to store individual bits of information. In order for this technology to come to fruition the magnetic anisotropy should be well controlled. The magnetic anisotropy determines both the field required to switch the magnetisation (which has a knock-on effect for power consumption) and the thermal stability (which detennines the lifetime of the stored information). At present, magnetic storage exploits materials with high perpendicular magnetic anisotropy. In this thesis we attempt to modify systems possessing perpendicular magnetic anisotropy, and promote these modifications in the context of future memory technologies.