Comparing medium models to physical media via MFM imagery

To fully understand a magnetic film's potential for data storage it is necessary to measure its complete magnetization. Although magnetic force microscopy (MFM) cannot perform this measurement, its simplicity leads us to examine its full potential for characterizing recording performance. For example, if MFM measurements of a film can be used to develop a corresponding micromagnetic model, then the model may provide insight into the film's recording performance. With this goal in mind, a technique is described that associates model magnetization patterns with MFM measurements. These patterns represent longitudinal recording films and are restricted to be uniform over grains that form a Voronoi tessellation of the film plane. Each grain's magnetization can be rotated such that the simulated MFM response from the pattern has a high cross correlation with measured data. While this technique does not produce a unique pattern for a given MFM measurement, it does provide information on what level of granularity is necessary to achieve a particular cross correlation and suggests the scale of the magnetic feature size.