Micromagnetics of thin film cobalt‐based media for magnetic recording

Methods of fabrication and characterization for thin films of CoCr, CoPt, CoPtCr, and similar alloys of interest in longitudinal magnetic recording are reviewed and certain interesting features of their magnetic behavior, revealed recently with modern high‐resolution observation techniques, are described. The micromagnetics of these polycrystalline thin film media has been studied by large‐scale simulations on the massively parallel Connection Machine. Methods and results of these simulations are presented.