Slit design for the thermal flying height control slider

Abstract

In this work, we propose a novel thermal flying height control (TFC) slider, by designing a slit near the thermal heater in the slider. Design of the slit can reduce the mechanical constraints on the head elements and concentrate the heat around head elements. In turn, head elements can achieve more thermal protrusion and flying height reduction compared to the traditional TFC slider. The simulation results show that the application of the slit achieves a flying height reduction of 1.4 nm at writer and 1.7 nm at reader. Parametric study indicates that a trade off among the slit thickness (a), the distance of the slit to ABS (d) and thermal heater (t) should be optimized to achieve both large flying height reduction and small difference of flying height between reader and writer.