Tuesday, September 21st, 2010
Western Digital, 1710 Automation Parkway, San Jose, CA
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Pizza too at 7:00 P.M.
Presentation at 7:30 P.M.
Thermally-Assisted Magnetic Recording at up to 1 Tb/in2 using an Integrated Plasmonic Antenna
Barry Stipe
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies
Abstract
Thermally-Assisted Magnetic Recording (TAR) and Bit Patterned Recording (BPR) are two of the most promising technologies for surpassing the fundamental limitations of conventional magnetic recording. In a typical TAR head design, a waveguide delivers light to a plasmonic aperture or antenna located at the air-bearing surface. The plasmonic device creates an intense optical pattern in the near-field, heating the disk at the nanometer scale. This writing technique allows one to use extremely high anisotropy media (such as L10 FePt) for reduced grain size while maintaining the requirements of thermal stability and writability. We have fully integrated a plasmonic antenna called the “E-antenna” into a magnetic head and then used it for recording on granular media with a static tester and spin stand.
So far, TAR at over 400 Gb/in2 has been limited by the availability of a suitable small grain media. BPR avoids the need for small grain media but it can be difficult to address the patterned bits at very small track pitch using a conventional write head. We have recently found that combining TAR and bit patterned media (BP-TAR) can solve both problems and allows for dramatic reductions in track pitch (down to 24 nm) and optical power requirements (factor of five) as compared to TAR recording on granular media. We show recording at up to 1 Tb/in2 [1]. BP-TAR may turn out to be the ultimate HDD technology and is, in principle, scalable to 100 Tb/in2.
[1] B. C. Stipe et al., "Magnetic recording at 1.5 Pb m-2 using an integrated plasmonic antenna," Nature Photonics 4, 484 - 488 (2010).
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