Abstract

One of the difficulties in magnetic recording is balancing the media signal-to-noise, thermal stability and writability. Scaling the areal density, while maintaining a proper balance between these three parameters, will require an alternative technology. One potential technology is Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR). The concept of HAMR and a HAMR head design will be introduced that uses light as the heat source. This head design tightly focuses light and collocates it with the magnetic field from a magnetic recording head. Modeling and characterization results from a HAMR head will be shown. Some future prospects for HAMR will be briefly covered, such as extending this HAMR head design to higher areal densities.

© 2007 Optical Society of America