Measurement of FePt thermal properties relevant to heat-assisted magnetic recording

Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) is the likely successor of the conventional perpendicular magnetic recording. Due to its high anisotropy, graded L10 ordered FePt is widely used as a HAMR recording layer. Electrically insulating MgO under-layer is essential for growing FePt in HAMR media. Experimentally, we observe very low thermal conductivity of FePt and significant thermal boundary resistance between FePt and MgO, whose magnitudes affect the HAMR thermal gradient. Realistic granular FePt media has >30% segregation, and, experimentally, we observe that FePt thermal properties are affected by segregation. We utilized time domain thermo-reflectance (TDTR) technique for studying FePt thermal conductivity and boundary resistance in realistic HAMR media stack. 1D finite element heat transport model was used for fitting experimental TDTR data and extracting thermal conductivities and related thermal boundary resistances. We found best fit thermal conductivity value for non-segregated FePt is as low as 13 W/mK. When reasonable amount of segregation (30%) is added, thermal conductivity reduces from 13 W/mK to 6 W/mK, and thermal boundary resistance to MgO reduces from 3.5 × 10−9 m2K/W to 0.7 × 10−9 m2K/W.