Extracting the intrinsic switching field distribution in perpendicular media: a comparative analysis

TL;DR

This paper presents a new FORC diagram-based method to accurately extract the microscopic switching-field distribution in perpendicular recording media, outperforming existing mean-field approximation methods across various interaction strengths.

Contribution

A novel FORC-based approach for intrinsic SFD extraction in perpendicular media, validated through micromagnetic simulations and comparison with existing methods.

Findings

FORC method provides more accurate SFD extraction.

Existing methods tend to overestimate SFD width.

The new method is robust across different dipolar interactions.

Abstract

We introduce a new method based on the first-order-reversal-curve (FORC) diagram to extract the intrinsic (microscopic) switching-field distribution (SFD) of perpendicular recording media (PRM). To demonstrate the viability of the method, we micromagnetically simulated FORCs for PRM with known SFD and compare the extracted SFD with the SFD obtained by means of two different methods that are based on recoil loops, too, which however rely on mean-field approximations and assumptions on the shape of the SFD. The FORC method turns out to be the most accurate algorithm over a broad range of dipolar interaction strengths, where the other methods overestimate the width of the SFD.