GOALI: Advancement of Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording Enabled by Time-Resolved Magneto-Optical Kerr Effect Metrology

Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) holds great potential for extending the storage areal density of hard disk drives, which allows more information to be stored in a hard disk of the same physical size. HAMR uses a laser to temporarily heat the recording medium (the disk material) during writing, allowing the use of media with high thermal stability at tiny bit sizes with small grains. However, this thermally-controlled switching brings new thermal management challenges, which require careful consideration of aggressive heat dissipation in the HAMR design to ensure the high performance and extended lifetime of data storage systems. This GOALI project aims to explore the thermal and magnetic performance of HAMR materials for developing high-performance and high-areal density HAMR devices. The collaboration between the University of Minnesota and Seagate Technology will inspire interest in heat transfer, energy conversion, and hard disk drive technology across a broader audience. The project team will study the thermal and magnetic properties of thin-film samples made of HAMR materials, under systematically varied temperatures and external magnetic fields. Particularly, the team will focus on understanding the fundamental mechanisms of how temperature will affect the magnetization dynamics in HAMR materials and thus the magnetic switching processes, and vice versa. The outcomes of this project will not only address the critical thermal challenges that currently limit recording device performance and reliability, but also advance the fundamental understanding of carrier physics linking temperature and magnetization. Such an understanding will also be critical for improving thermal management in other giant magneto-resistive devices and potentially advancing the new magnetic sensor technology.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.