New concepts on magnetooptical memories

We report here new concepts which combine the advantages of magnetic writing and optical reading, to solve the problems related to conventional magnetooptical recording systems. The idea is to write data with a magnetic head as in perpendicular recording and to read them by blocks of n × n bits using polar Kerr effect. This paper includes several solutions to make tracking and focus servo more simple. Read/write results are given on GdTbFe and TbFe layers.