Both the isothermal remanent magnetization and the dc demagnetization
remanence were measured on thin films of CoCr with a perpendicular ani
sotropy energy suitable for perpendicular recording media. The measure
ments were made with two applied magnetic field geometries, parallel a
nd perpendicular to the film plane. Plots of the dc demagnetization re
manence versus the isothermal remanent magnetization were used to dete
rmine the presence of interactions for both applied magnetic field geo
metries. As expected, the perpendicular magnetization process is domin
ated by the demagnetization field. When the data are corrected for the
demagnetization field, a residual negative interaction is found from
the perpendicular data. This negative interaction was also observed in
the parallel applied field geometry plots, where the demagnetization
factor is negligible. The success of the analysis, using a mean-field
approximation to model the interactions, which in this case is the dem
agnetization field, suggests a general technique to quantify interacti
ons in magnetic systems.