Influence of texture formation on properties of films for perpendicular magnetic recording

For perpendicular magnetic recording layers the c-axis inplane components and the effective uniaxial anisotropy are calculated in dependence on the angular width of the c-axis texture as well as on the amount of parasitic non c-axis textures. Taking into account an inhomogeneous distribution of the texture, i.e. a transition layer within the film experimental observations in the literature may be well understood. The dependence of magnetic characteristics on the film thickness is evaluated. It is shown that film quality has to be characterized by the full texture distribution function rather than by texture half width alone.