A simulation of magnetic recording on coarsely granular media

Abstract

The superparamagnetic effect dictates a lower limit to the size of magnetic grains in the recording medium. At very high areal densities each bit of information will thus be recorded on relatively few magnetic grains. Since the grains have random positions and sizes, there will be large statistical fluctuations or noise on the recovered signal. Modelling the media grains as random Voronoi regions, we simulate the process of writing, reading, detection and error-correction. Although the signal-to-noise ratio is very poor, we find that it possible in the simulation to recover data reliably with as few as four grains per bit.