2001 Volume 25 Issue 10 Pages 1535-1540
This paper analyzes two-dimensional features of the magnetic microstructure of longitudinal thin-film media. Several MFM analyses of the magnetic cluster size have been presented, but the two-dimensional features of the clusters are not well understood. In order to determine these features, we focused on the distribution of magnetic poles at the boundaries of magnetic clusters, and quantitatively analyzed it by using two kinds of image processing methods: binarization and thinning methods. The results were as follows: (1) we found that some media showed dependence on the specific direction in the distribution of magnetic poles in the dc-erased state, whose features are closely related to the magnetization fluctuations in transition regions, and (2) media with larger fluctuations in the transition region had larger Nm/S0 values and partial erasure (PE) probabilities.
