铁铂合金可能成新一代硬盘存储材料

Meeting the demand for more data storage in smaller volumes means using materials made up of ever-smaller magnets, or nanomagnets. One promising ¹ material for a potential new generation of recording ² media is an alloy ³ of iron and platinum ⁴ with an ordered crystal structure. Researchers led by Professor Kai Liu and graduate student Dustin Gilbert at the University of California, Davis, have now found a convenient way to make these alloys ⁵ and tailor their properties. "The relatively ⁶ convenient synthesis conditions, along with the tunable ⁷ magnetic properties, make these materials highly desirable for future magnetic recording technologies," said Liu, a professor of physics. The iron-platinum alloy has the ability to retain information even at extremely small nanomagnet sizes, and it is resistant ⁸ to heat effects., ,Previous methods for making the iron-platinum alloys with an ordered crystal structure involved high-temperature treatments that would be difficult to integrate（整合） into the rest of the manufacturing process, Liu said., ,The researchers, including Liang-Wei Wang and Chih-Huang Lai of the National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, and Timothy Klemmer and Jan-Ulrich Thiele, of Seagate Technologies in Fremont, used a method called atomic-scale multilayer sputtering ⁹ to create a material with extremely thin layers of metal, and rapid thermal ¹⁰ annealing to convert it into the desirable ordered alloy. They were able to adjust the magnetic properties of the alloy by adding small amounts of copper ¹¹ into particular regions of the alloy., ,A paper describing the work was recently published in the journal Applied ¹² Physics Letters and featured in its Research Highlights. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation Materials World Network Program.