Applied Surface Science, because a novel and general (applicable to wide variety of material surfaces and thin films) nanopatterning technique proposed by the authors eariler, is applied here to successfully fabricate dot-patterned CoPt thin films exhibiting perpendicular magnetism. The manuscript topic fits nicely to the accommodated topics as it deals with 2D assembly and nanopatterning of sputter deposited magnetic CoPt thin films. Our results can be considered as a possibility to realize Bit Patterned Media (BPM). Thus, our paper should be of service for researchers interested in fabricating ordered nanopatterns, in particular perpendicular magnetic dot-patterned thin films. Moreover, the technique applied in this paper can easily be scaled to industrial throughput and it is relatively cheap.Cover Letter A C C E P T E D M A N U S C R I P T Highlights A novel nanopatterning technique proposed recently is applied to CoPt thin films CoPt films are transformed to L1 0 structure both before and after nanopatterning Dot-patterned CoPt films with surface-perpendicular magnetic easy axis were obtained Feature size can be reduced to <20nm and possible to scale to industrial throughput Our work can be considered as a possibility to realize Bit Patterned Media (BPM) *Highlights (for review)
Responses to the Editor and ReviewersEditor:The authors thank to Editor for the remarks. The format of the citations is changed to show all the authors and some more citations towards Applied Surface Science are added to the manuscript. The XRD scales in Figure 4 are corrected as well.Reviewer #1:The authors are thankful to Reviewer #1 for the useful comments and remarks. Here are our answers point-by-point: 1) Magnetic properties of the continues film is missing in current manuscript. I suggest add the in-plane and out-of-plane M-H loop to Fig. 8(a). So that the effect of dot geometry can be clearly observed.The magnetic properties of the annealed but non-patterned CoPt films are described in the authors' previous paper [1]. However, this fact was not mentioned in the in the "magnetic properties" section of the current manuscript. The previous paper was only cited in other sections of the current manuscript. For comparison, the VSM result of an annealed but nonpatterned CoPt film from our previous paper [1] is shown here together with the VSM Fig. 8(a) from the current manuscript.
*Response to ReviewersAs it is seen, the two perpendicular measurements are very similar (besides the noise). The coercive force of the patterned sample seems to be somewhat larger, but this can't be stated due to the noise of the measurement. On the other hand, the in-plane hysteresis loop is way smaller in the case of the patterned sample. A few words about this comparison are added to the "magnetic properties section" of the current manuscript together with a citation to our previous paper.2) It will be good also compare the M-H loop before and after annealing. For both dot array and continuous film.For comparison, the Fig 8(a) of the manusc...