At the ultimate limit of magnetic recording, suitable storage media will consist of nanometer-sized entities, each of which will carry one bit of information. Materials with a high magnetocrystalline anisotropy energy are required to guarantee thermal stability of the ferromagnetic state at realistic operating temperatures. The face-centered tetragonal (fct) L1 0 FePt alloy belongs to the promising class of materials that offer the perspective of storing one magnetic bit per nanoparticle. [1][2][3] Widespread activities have therefore arisen worldwide, targeting novel strategies for both the synthesis [1,[4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] of suitable magnetic nanostructures and their organization into superlattices [4,12,[15][16][17][18] by means of parallel processes. Here, we present a new approach for the synthesis of size-selected L1 0 FePt nanoparticles based on the self-organization of spherical micelles formed by diblock copolymers, thereby significantly extending a previous technique [19][20][21] to produce large-scale arrays of elemental nanoparticles. Our approach overcomes the typical drawbacks of the current colloidal routes towards densely packed arrays of ferromagnetic FePt nanoparticles while still guaranteeing areal densities exceeding 1 Tbits inch -2 (1 inch ≈ 2.54 cm).Since the first presentation of magnetic data-storage devices five decades ago, the areal density of digital information has increased by eight orders of magnitude to reach values of about 200 Gbits inch -2 , as found in present hard disk drives.[22]A few years ago, an efficient method was developed to synthesize FePt nanoparticles on the basis of wet-chemical synthesis (hereafter referred to "colloidal"), which involves particle stabilization by an organic-ligand shell.[1] The significant advantage of this approach, allowing a simple preparation of densely packed 2D nanoparticle arrays from corresponding particle solutions, is, however, compensated by some serious drawbacks related to the thin ligand shell (1-3 nm) which serves as a spacer between the nanoparticles. As a consequence of the resulting small interparticle distance, the nanoparticles exhibit a strong tendency to aggregate during heat treatments. [23,24] Thermal annealing at 500-600°C is, however, generally required in order to transform the assynthesized, chemically disordered (Fe and Pt atoms randomly distributed over the lattice sites) face-centered cubic (fcc) structure, which results in superparamagnetic behavior, into the magnetically attractive L1 0 phase. Furthermore, undesirable collective magnetic dynamics arise at such small interparticle distances through dipolar coupling; [24,25] collective modes, however, are clearly at odds with the idea of storing magnetic data in individual nanoparticles. Finally, the heat-treated colloidal FePt nanoparticles are found to be highly oxidized and contaminated by carbon because of the thermally induced decomposition of the organic shell.[26]Recent alternative routes for the synthesis of L1 0 FePt nanoparticles include...

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Arrays of FePt particles (diameter 7nm) with mean interparticle distances of 60nm are prepared by a micellar technique on Si substrates. The phase transition of these magnetic particles towards the chemically ordered L10 phase is tracked for 350kV He+ ion irradiated samples and compared to a nonirradiated reference. Due to the large separation of the magnetically decoupled particles the array can be safely annealed without any agglomeration as usually observed for more densely packed colloidal FePt nanoparticles. The He+ ion exposure yields a significant reduction of the ordering temperature by more than 100K.

It is experimentally demonstrated that, after ion irradiating 60nm thick Au films on Si substrates with 230keV Ar+ ions, annealing conditions can be found leading to strong diffusional contrasts between bombarded and unbombarded areas. While Au readily diffuses into the bombarded part of the sample at 310°C, its diffusion is still completely blocked under identical conditions in the unbombarded parts. Clear evidence is provided that this diffusional contrast is due to bombardment induced amorphization of the underlying Si substrate. The amorphous Silicon (a-Si), however, has to extend right to the Au∕Si interface, since any intermediate crystalline layer will suppress the diffusional contrast. An example for this latter situation is realized by performing the ion bombardment prior to the evaporation of the top Au layer leading to a still crystalline Si surface layer, which is found to act as a barrier against Au diffusion at 310°C. In accordance with the idea that a-Si, independent of its specific preparation, causes the observed Au diffusion enhancement, the effect is also found for a-Si prepared by evaporation at ambient temperature. In that case an even higher Au diffusion coefficient is obtained than for Si amorphized by ion bombardment pointing to subtle structural differences between both types of amorphous Si.

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