R&D: Four Articles on HAMR, MAMR and SMR Disks
StorageNewsletter.com, Tuesday, February 17th, 2026
High-throughput SEM imaging of nanoscale metal grains for HAMR, quantifying erasure and interference from adjacent tracks in HAMR, cubic anisotropy media for MAMR, mitigating the Write-amplification effect of large-scale semi-external graphs on SMR drives
R&D: High-throughput SEM imaging of nanoscale metal grains for heat assisted magnetic recording High-throughput SEM grain imaging as demonstrated in this work yields large materials characterization datasets without expensive detectors or specialized hardware.
Abstract: 'Development of nanoscale magnetic and plasmonic materials for applications such as Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording requires precise control and understanding of the materials' microstructure. Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) has the speed and resolution to characterize grain structure with high throughput, but there is little precedence for imaging sub-50 nm, crystallographically-aligned metal grains in a traditional SEM without specialized detectors or optics.
Imaging ungrounded micron-scale metal structures on wafers presents further challenges due to charging. By optimizing imaging parameters for each sample, sub-50 nm and sub-25 nm metal grains were captured. Monte Carlo simulations were used to understand the depth of backscattered electron signal for the stacks of materials and the effect of grain boundary tilt on grain boundary contrast..."