Abstract: A magneto-optical recording medium in which the inside of grooves formed along recording tracks is a signal recording area in groove recording, and the domain wall displacement detection method is employed; and a curvature radius R1, in the cross section perpendicular to the recording tracks, of a shoulder portion of a land separating the grooves that is adjacent to the groove is 30 nm or less and a curvature radius R2, in the cross section perpendicular to the recording tracks, of the inside edge portion of the groove for the recording that is adjacent to the land is 20 nm or more, so that a wide recording power margin can be obtained, the jitter can be improved, and the error rate can also be improved.

Abstract: A solid-state image pickup device 10 has an arrangement in which a second conductivity type semiconductor region 14 is formed on the surface of a first conductivity type electric charge accumulation region 13 of a light-receiving sensor portion, a shallow trench isolation layer 20 formed of an insulating layer is buried into a trench formed on a semiconductor substrate 11, the shallow trench isolation layer 20 is composed of an upper wide portion 21 and a lower narrow portion 22 and a second conductivity type semiconductor region 23 is formed around the lower narrow portion 22 of the shallow trench isolation layer 20. The solid-state image pickup device can suppress the occurrence of a dark current and a white spot, it can produce an image with high image quality and it can sufficiently maintain a sufficiently large amount of electric charges that can be handled by the light-receiving sensor portion.

Abstract: A polishing method for electropolishing a metal film formed on a wafer surface so as to fill concave portions formed on the wafer surface comprises a step of determining an electropolishing end point of the metal film on the basis of a change of a current waveform resulting from electropolishing the metal film. An electropolishing apparatus comprising a current detector for detecting a current waveform resulting from electropolishing a metal film and an end point determination part for determining an electropolishing end point of the metal film on the basis of the change of a current detected with the current detector is used to realize the polishing method.