  The switching probability of magnetic elements for heat assisted recording is
investigated. It is found that FePt elements with a diameter of 5 nm and a
height of 10nm show, at a field of 0.5 T, thermally written in errors of 12
percent, which is significant too large for bit patterned magnetic recording.
Thermally written in errors can be decreased if larger head fields are applied.
However, larger fields lead to an increase the fundamental thermal jitter. This
leads to a dilemma between thermally written in errors and fundamental thermal
jitter. This dilemma can be partly relaxed by increasing the thickness of the
FePt film up to 30nm. For realistic head fields, it is found that the
fundamental thermal jitter is in the same order of magnitude of the fundamental
thermal jitter in conventional recording, which is about 0.5 to 0.8 nm.
Composite structures consisting of high Curie top layer and FePt as hard
magnetic storage layer can reduce the thermally written in errors to be smaller
than 10-4 if the damping constant is increased in the soft layer. Large damping
may be realized by doping with rare earth elements. Similar to single FePt
grains also in composite structure an increase of switching probability is
sacrifices by an increase of thermal jitter. Structures utilizing first order
phase transitions breaking the thermal jitter and writeability dilemma are
discussed.
