Fabrication and properties of CoPt patterned media with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy

Magnetic dot-arrays with dot diameters of 80 to 1000 nm have been fabricated by patterning CoPt alloy continuous films. All of the fabricated dots had their magnetic easy axes perpendicular to the plane. From MFM observations, dots with diameters of 160 nm and larger had multi domain structures. For the dot-array with 80 nm dot diameter, every dot was observed as a single domain. CoPt dot-array with 80 nm dot diameter showed excellent thermal stability in comparison with conventional longitudinal media and perpendicular media.