Abstract
Magnetic force microscopy (MFM) is one of the primary imaging tools for studying magnetic nanostructures. The resolution of MFM has been considered as a main issue in characterizing magnetic nanostructures smaller than 30 nm; especially for high density recording media beyond 1 Tbit/in(2). In this letter, we investigated three different kinds of MFM tips such as those with a perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) derived from a crystallographic texture, antiferromagnetic coupled perpendicular (AFC) tips and tips with no crystallographic textures, resulting in no PMA. Their resolution, as measured using a recording media with written information, was compared with that of commercial MFM tips. The tip in the PMA configuration was found to provide the best resolution among all of them.