9406198 Indeck The proposed research will have two facets: it will be a contribution to the understanding and design of materials and components of information storage systems from a new viewpoint, and it will serve as the basis for a potential breakthrough in increasing the capacity of information storage systems. Recent studies suggest that the limiting effects of media noise in information storage systems are capable of being reduced or eliminated by the use of "smart" components in the storage channel that sense the irregularities and compensate for them in the storage and/or retrieval process. Such adaptive compensation can be made possible in real time because of the speed advantage of semiconductor electronics processing over magnetization process time scales. It is anticipated that a novel and unconventional approach to medium noise reduction will become indispensable as storage densities (especially track densities) increase. Several possible approaches to adaptive media noise compensation can be envisaged at present, however, a detailed choice and a successful implementation will require physical and analytical information not currently available. The purpose of this work is to provide some of the scientific underpinnings for such an effort. Accordingly the research activities will include several interdependent studies: oMicroscopy: determination of the physical and magnetic microstructure of medial and transducers oMagnetic measurements of feature size, using instruments, experimental methods, and methods of data reduction and analysis developed at Washington University. oMeasurements and modeling of the trackwidth dependence of media noise. oModeling and computational physics of storage media; correlation of micromagnetic calculation with microscope observation; prediction of the attainable storage capacity of a physically realizable storage system. oDevelopment of design criteria for adaptive noise compensation and design of multi-element transducers for functional implementation. The results of the proposed research will have two-fold significance, as an augmentation of the science base of magnetic information storage, and as a new departure in the design of storage systems. ***
