Basic physics and current technologies of magneto-optical recording are reviewed. The development owes much to the discovery of amorphous rare earth-transition metal (RE-TM) films, which exhibit quite uniform magnetic and optical properties in the scale of practical interest. The RE-TM films also exhibit a wide variety of thermomagnetic properties on adjusting their composition, which resulted in the recent development of high-density recording using multilayer films. In amorphous RE-TM films it is possible to record thermomagnetically marks some several tens of nanometres in size. In order to readout such small recorded marks, further development of new readout techniques is necessary. [References: 43]
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