UC Riverside

Technological developments in the magnetic disk storage industry have relied heavily on the scalability of magnetic bits to ever smaller dimensions in order to provide an increase in areal data densities. This progress has recently been stifled by the Superparamagnetic limit. The Superparamagnetic limit fundamentally restricts the size to which a magnetic bit can be decreased. This limit results from thermal instability of magnetic bits which result in randomization of the magnetic moments within the magnetic media itself as bit dimensions are decreased.

Presently, the Superparamagnetic limit promises to stifle further progress in the magnetic disk-based data storage industry. Therefore, new avenues for technological development in this sector must be pursued to maintain compliance with moor's law and propel future development in this sector at a pace which will keep the industry vital in the coming decades.

In this thesis, a new methodology is proposed by which the technological developments of the traditional magnetic data storage industry can be utilized and the pitfalls of magnetic storage can be avoided. Herein a disk storage implementation involving photo-reactive protein films consisting of Bacteriorhodopsin is presented for extending aerial densities beyond 10 Tbit/in ^{2. System requirements of a commercial application utilizing this technology are presented in detail. The absorption properties of Bacteriorhodopsin (BR) monolayer films, deposited via Electrostatic Self-Assembly, have been studied for the first time to better understand the underlying read/write processes as applicable to this new technology.}