Stacking faults in perpendicular media; the relationship to anisotropy dispersion

摘要

Recent experimental data [1] indicates the presence of stacking faults in CoPt media, which give rise to a reduction of the effective value of HK via the introduction of local fcc planes. In this paper we analyse this effect using a simple model based on empirical characterization of micromagnetic calculations and the assumption of a probability of stacking fault formation dependent on the energy difference between the fcc and hcp phases. The analysis shows that the statistical distribution of the fcc planes among the grains can give a significant contribution to the width of the effective HK dispersion. In fact it is found with the assumption that all of the σHK arises from this mechanism we obtain a simple expression relating the stacking fault density to σHK, which gives reasonable estimates of the density of stacking faults.