Film Composition, Substrate Temperature, and Thickness Dependence of Sm(Co, Cu)$_{5}$ /Ru Thin Films With Perpendicular Anisotropy

SmCo
₅
thin film has been considered as one of several promising candidates for extremely high areal density recording media because of the demand of media with extremely small but thermally stable grains. In this paper, Sm(Co, Cu)
₅
films with perpendicular anisotropy were successfully fabricated by dc sputtering with relatively small grain size. Zero in-plane coercivity and 11 kOe out-of-plane coercivity were obtained on Ta(3 nm)/Sm-Co-Cu(10 nm)/Ru(20 nm)/Ta(4.2 nm) thin films. Effects of deposition temperature, film composition, and film thickness on the magnetic properties of SmCoCu films were investigated and reported.