Patent ID: 7862915

Claim:
A magnetic recording medium comprising: a substrate; a soft magnetic layer formed on the substrate; a multilayered underlayer comprising a first underlayer formed on the soft magnetic layer, containing copper as a main component, and containing crystal grains with a face centered cubic lattice structure substantially aligned in a (111) plane, a second underlayer formed on the first underlayer and containing copper and nitrogen as main components and a third underlayer having an islands structure of which grains are isolated each other on the second underlayer; and a perpendicular magnetic recording layer formed on the multilayered underlayer, containing cobalt as a main component, and containing crystal grains with a hexagonal close-packed structure aligned in a (0001) plane, wherein the second underlayer is formed by doping nitrogen in the surface region of the first underlayer, the third underlayer contains metal crystal grains containing at least one metal selected from the group consisting of silver, iridium, and iron, and an average grain size of a metal crystal grains is smaller than an average crystal grain size of the crystal grains in the first underlayer.