A Partially Pole-Embedded Transducer for Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording

Although significant progress has been made toward achieving 10 Tbpsi and beyond, the continued progression of the hard-disk drive development remains a challenging endeavor. A panoptic view indicates several factors that contribute to the challenge, including media as well as recording head design challenges. The heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) head, specifically, has the broad responsibility of producing a magnetic field, delivering light to the optical transducer, and transforming optical energy into localized thermal energy within the media. Resulting thermal gradients in the recording layer exceeding 10 K/nm can often yield a satisfactory recording performance; however, this can be at the expense of elevated temperatures in the system. Here, we discuss an analysis of a write pole-embedded near-field transducer and demonstrate that it can not only provide improved optical efficiency and cooling in the head but also has the potential to achieve competitive thermal gradients in the recording layer, exceeding 20 K/nm, with peak temperatures 750 K < T < 850 K. Moreover, the best case among the parameter space explored here demonstrates the HAMR recording signal-to-noise ratio levels exceeding 22.5 dB at 1000 kFCI. The results of the analysis strongly suggest that a magnetic write pole-embedded transducer potentially may provide an attractive path toward higher linear densities with the HAMR technology.