Microwave assisted magnetic recording technologies and related physics

Microwave assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) has been proposed as one of the prospective recording technologies for forthcoming tera-bit-class magnetic recording. In this paper, the technological and related physical issues of MAMR are reviewed. MAMR is the combined technology of microwave assisted switching (MAS) and spin torque oscillator (STO). MAS is a magnetization switching technology in which magnetization switches through excitation of its precessional motion by a radio frequency (rf) field. The MAS behavior in which nonlinear large angle precession is excited has been a challenging issue from scientific and technological viewpoints. Recently developed theories successfully predict the MAS behavior of a single macrospin in which all spins in a magnet are assumed to behave coherently. For a magnetic element with a size larger than the exchange length, spatially non-uniform magnetization precession modes become dominant instead of the coherent precession mentioned above, resulting in significant enhancement of the MAS effect. This size dependent MAS effect is experimentally very well verified for nanosized dots with perpendicular magnetization. Meanwhile, the STO is used as an rf field generator in MAMR technology. The aforementioned large angle magnetization precession dynamics are also a crucial problem for the stable operation of STO. While various types of STOs have been proposed so far, the optimum structure of STO for MAMR is still under investigation. The combination of the MAS and STO may provide frequency domain recording architecture which enables us to realize a new recording scheme, such as multilevel recording.