Thin-film heads with anistropy-determined track widths

Multitrack yoke-type MR readout heads having a single shared front fluxguide with a highly anisotropic permeability, have been designed and evaluated. The well defined microtrack response profiles of these heads show that the anisotropy of the permeability confines the flux-detection to the area on tape in between the contact leads of the MR element. This can be exploited in ''full-density'' tape recording heads which read directly a number of adjacent tracks.