Multiscale micromagnetic / atomistic modeling of heat assisted magnetic recording

Abstract

Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) is a recent advancement in magnetic recording, allowing to significantly increase the areal density capability (ADC) of hard disk drives (HDDs) compared to the perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology. This is enabled by high anisotropy FePt media, which needs to be heated through its Curie temperature (TC) to facilitate magnetization reversal by an electromagnetic write pole. HAMR micromagnetic modeling is therefore challenging, as it needs to be performed in proximity to and above TC, where a ferromagnet has no spontaneous magnetization. An atomistic model is an optimal solution here, as it doesn't require any parameter renormalization or non-physical assumptions for modeling at any temperature. However, a full track atomistic recording model is extremely computationally expensive. Here we demonstrate a true multiscale HAMR modeling approach, combining atomistic spin dynamics modeling for high temperature regions and micromagnetic modeling for lower temperature regions, in a moving simulation window embedded within a long magnetic track. The advantages of this approach include natural emergence of TC and anisotropy distributions of FePt grains. Efficient GPU optimization of the code provides very fast running times, with a 60~nm wide track of twenty-five 20~nm - long bits being recorded in several hours on a single GPU. The effects of realistic FePt L10 vs simple cubic crystal structure is discussed, with the latter providing further running time gains while keeping the advantages of the multiscale approach.