Breaking the 2-nm Barrier in Hard Disk Drives Using Monolayer Amorphous Carbon Overcoats

“Breaking the 2-nm Barrier in Hard Disk Drives Using Monolayer Amorphous Carbon Overcoats” was made possible by a long-term collaboration with an industry partner, from early problem definition all the way through real manufacturing constraints. It is now accepted in Advanced Materials.

It also arrives at an inflection point for storage: AI is accelerating data growth in data centers, while the industry transitions to heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). Together, these trends raise the bar for the media overcoat—demanding higher areal density and lower cost at scale, while tolerating repeated localized thermal cycling and still providing robust corrosion protection at ever-smaller thicknesses.

This project started more than 12 years ago, when Fuji Electric still had an HDD business and invited us to tackle what was then a fundamental—but not yet urgent—problem: the anti-oxidation barrier layer that ultimately limits areal density in hard disk drives (HDDs). We initially explored graphene, but both direct growth and transfer approaches ran into hard constraints set by thermal budget and surface roughness. Those dead ends forced us to rethink ultrathin carbon overcoats from the ground up, ultimately leading to the discovery of monolayer amorphous carbon (MAC) (Chee-Tat Toh et al., “Synthesis and properties of free-standing monolayer amorphous carbon,” Nature 577(7789), 199–203 (2020); https://lnkd.in/gsCQTzs6).

For data storage, this work is now advancing through close collaboration with a global technology leader in magnetic recording media, positioning the materials for real-world implementation.

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