MATERIALS FOR MAGNETO-OPTICAL DATA STORAGE.

Amorphous rare earth-transition metal (RE-TM) alloys are currently the most promising media for erasable optical data storage. Thin films of these alloys can be deposited on relatively large substrates by both vacuum evaporation and sputtering and can exhibit desirable recording characteristics such as uniformity of structure, lack of grains and crystallites, perpendicular magnetic anisotropy and large magnetic coercivity. The structural and magnetic properties of the films are strongly dependent on the deposition environment and in the case of sputter deposited films for example, vary with the argon pressure, substrate temperature and the substrate bias voltage. These dependencies are discussed in the light of new theoretical and experimental results.