Thermal stability enhancement of perpendicular media with high-order uniaxial anisotropy

The effect of second-order uniaxial anisotropy energy K/sub 2/ on thermal stability and writability of perpendicular media has been studied. Due to the high orientation of crystalline easy axes, both energy barrier and dynamic coercivity of perpendicular media increases with K/sub 2/. With relatively more increase in energy barrier, improvement of the tradeoff between thermal stability and writability can be achieved by increasing K/sub 2/. The field angle dependence with nonzero K/sub 2/ is also quantitatively investigated.