Time-domain study of proximity-effect induced transition shifts

Abstract

An accurate time-domain technique for measuring the proximity-effect-induced nonlinear transition shift has been developed, and this technique is applied to the case of a thin-film inductive head writing on a metal-film disk of high coercivity and high coercive squareness. Significant proximity shift at high densities is shown, even when the writeability may be considered good by overwrite and hard transition shift criteria. Furthermore, many basic properties of the proximity shift have been clearly resolved by the experiments, including the attractive and long-range nature of the proximity shift, the presence of ripple structures at low densities, and the nonlinear interactions between the proximity shift and the hard transition effect. Modeling studies have also been used to obtain a good understanding of these properties, and the theoretical results show good qualitative agreement with the experimental proximity-shift behavior.