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Data storage

The third plasmonic revolution

Nature Nanotechnology volume 5, pages 482–483 (2010)Cite this article

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Combining nanostructured magnetic media with nanoplasmonic antennas has propelled commercially viable data-storage densities beyond one terabit per square inch.

Magnetic recording media are made from ferromagnetic materials, such as Fe, Co, Ni and their alloys, and information is stored in localized regions (magnetic domains) that retain a spontaneous magnetization that can be aligned in a certain direction by applying an external magnetic field. The main limitation to increasing the areal density of magnetic storage is the magnetic material used to store the data. If the area of the bit cell is reduced, the number of grains within it becomes smaller and smaller until it is no longer possible to distinguish between the grains and the cells. The solution is to reduce the grain size, but below a certain size the grains become unstable and their magnetizations can change arbitrarily owing to thermal effects. To avoid this superparamagnetic limit and take advantage of smaller grain sizes, one needs to use materials with a higher magnetocrystalline anisotropy energy — the energy required to change magnetization from one direction to another. However, this means that higher switching fields are needed to write the data, but these fields are limited by the magnetic properties of the materials in the recording head.

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Figure 1: Areal density (on a log scale) versus year for different forms of magnetic HDD technology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Daniel O'Connor and Anatoly V. Zayats are in the Centre for Nanostructured Media, The Queen's University of Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, UK. a.zayats@qub.ac.uk,

    Daniel O'Connor & Anatoly V. Zayats

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  1. Daniel O'Connor
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  2. Anatoly V. Zayats
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O'Connor, D., Zayats, A. The third plasmonic revolution. Nature Nanotech 5, 482–483 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2010.137

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