The role of dipolar interactions for the determination of intrinsic switching field distributions

The $\Delta H(M, \Delta M)$ method and its ability to determine intrinsic switching field distributions of perpendicular recording media are numerically studied. It is found that the presence of dipolar interactions in the range of typical recording media substantially enhances the reliability of the $\Delta H(M,\Delta M)$ method. In addition, a strong correlation is observed between the precision of this method and a self-consistency-check of the data sets, which is based upon a simple redundancy measure. This suggests that the latter can be utilized as an efficient criterion to decide if a complete data analysis is warranted or not.