Press releases
Please quote Nature Materials as the source of these items.
February 2005
Tilted media for magnetic data storage
In the March issue of Nature Materials, Manfred Albrecht and colleagues report the fabrication of a new type of magnetic media that promises to greatly increase attainable storage densities, thermal stability and writing speeds for Internet and other applications.
Since the invention of the hard-disk drive in 1957, the storage density of magnetic recording has increased by about eight orders of magnitude. In principle, still higher storage densities are possible with perpendicular magnetic recording, in which the magnetization of the medium is perpendicular to the film plane. The first perpendicular hard-disk drives have just hit the market, but many problems remain before the potential ultra-high storage densities can be achieved. Albrecht and co-workers have now made magnetic nanostructures in which the magnetization is tilted at 45 degrees, using a traditional thin-film sputtering process that was previously thought to be unsuitable.
By tilting the axis of magnetization in this way, the writing speed should be more than ten times faster than in conventional perpendicular media. The higher storage densities and faster writing speeds should result in a much higher data-transfer rate.
