Materials and processing aspects of CoCrTa/Cr longitudinal recording media. II. Microstructure

In the CoCrTa/Cr system, it has been postulated that segregation of nonmagnetic constituents to grain boundaries is responsible for the low noise and high coercivity. However, direct experimental evidence is still lacking. In this investigation, we have carried out microstructural studies using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and atomic resolution transmission electron microscopy (ARTEM) of CoCrTa/Cr films produced under varying processing conditions. We found that the stacking fault density and the degree of crystalline perfection between the faults is most important in increasing the coercivity and improving signal-noise properties as indicated by ΔM measurement. High substrate temperatures and high Cr and Ta concentrations promote the occurrence of the stacking faults in the films. In conjunction with ARTEM results, we propose that these faults provide possible sites for elemental segregation which is partially responsible for reducing the magnetic coupling among the unfaulted hcp regions in the CoCrTa films. We also provide microstructural evidence supporting the picture that the high-frequency mechanical texture lines break the intergranular coupling normal to the texture lines resulting in circumferential anisotropy. Grains are crystallographically correlated to form clusters between the texture lines but such correlation is broken up by the texture lines. This gives rise to an effective shape-induced anisotropy. We believe that the cluster size plays a more important role than does the grain size in determining the magnetic properties of CoCrTa/Cr media.