Dependence of maximum readout power on various properties of thin-film magnetooptic media.

In magnetooptic recording it is desirable that the read laser power be as large as possible without causing degradation of the recorded information. We have developed a test that efficiently simulates the repeated reading of the recorded magnetic domains. This technique is used to determine the maximum read power and minimum write power of a variety of magnetooptic materials on a variety of substrates. We report the correlation between maximum read power, coercivity of the sample, and thermal properties of the substrate.