A digital recording study of CrO2particulate media

The debut has recently been witnessed of a very interesting magnetic recording surface composed of particulate dispersions of highly acicular chrome dioxide (CrO2). Magnetically, this medium exhibits much higher remanence and hysteretic squareness than the conventional γ-Fe2O3media and allows for a very wide variability of the coercivity. This paper presents the results of an experimental and theoretical study of the digital recording properties of CrO2media and a comparative assessment of their recording performance to that of γ-Fe2O3media. The results show a large superiority of CrO2in signal output, which makes it particularly attractive for out-of-contact applications such as disks, for thin coatings, and for very high density applications such as video recordings. It also exhibits somewhat superior resolution than γ-Fe2O3, but the advantage here is reduced by its higher remanence, which was found to have a small but significant adverse effect on resolution.