Novel soft lithography technique for fabrication of Ni nanodots for use as bit patterned media

Magnetic disk drive technology has successfully reduced the size of multi-grain bits to ~30 nm, and there are intensive industrial efforts to shrink the bit size further. This work reports the development of a cheap, scalable polymer template lithography technique of fabricating large arrays of magnetic nanostructures towards use as bit patterned media, one of the prominent next generation data storage technologies. The technique has been standardized and physical properties such as bit sizes, pitch sizes and the storage densities have been calculated. Critical magnetic properties such as magnetization reversal have also been studied and discussed to ascertain the plausibility of its use in futuristic high density magnetic data storage devices.