High coercivity and small grains of Fe/sub 60-x/Pt/sub 40/Cu/sub x/ ternary thin films

Summary form only given. L1/sub 0/ FePt thin films with high coercivity and remanence are generally considered a good potential material for use as a high density recording medium. The medium also requires isolated small particles to reduce inter-grain magnetic interactions, which leads to lower noise. Many third metallic elements such as Cr, Ti, W, and etc were added to achieve these goals. However, decrease of coercivity was unavoidable in these metallic films. In this paper we first report a high coercivity as well as smaller grains of Fe/sub 60-x/Pt/sub 40/Cu/sub x/ ternary thin films. Coercivity higher than 10 kOe and small grains of 30 nm could be achieved when 4 at. % Cu were added in 50 nm Fe/sub 60/Pt/sub 40/ films. For these, 50 nm Fe/sub 60-x/Pt/sub 40/M/sub x/ (M=Cu, Cr) thin films were sputtered from Fe-Pt-(Cu, Cr) composite target on the coming 7059 glass by DC magnetron sputtering.