Thermal decay in high density disk media

An experimental technique has been developed to accurately measure the time dependence of playback voltage due to the decay of recorded magnetization patterns. A "calibration" procedure is utilized to minimize the effect of magnetoresistive head sensitivity variations. This technique is applied to a systematic study of the dependence of the signal decay on recording bit density and magnetic layer thickness in longitudinal thin film media. A Neel-Arrhenius type model is introduced to calculate the degradation of a square wave magnetization pattern subject to thermal agitation. Because the equivalent external field which reduces the energy barrier is the time and spatially varying magnetostatic field produced by magnetic transitions, an iterative procedure is utilized to obtain the time dependent magnetization. The model takes into account distributions of grain volume and anisotropy axis. The calculation results are compared with the experimental data and good agreement is obtained.