Use of an embedded contact sensor to study nanoscale heat transfer in heat assisted magnetic recording

Abstract

A near field transducer is employed in the heat assisted magnetic recording technology in order to focus the light energy into a nanoscale spot on the disk. This is necessary to heat the high coercivity magnetic media to their Curie temperature, so the write transducer can record the data. However, the heat transfer mechanism across the head disk interface (HDI) is still not well understood. The current perpendicular media recording systems have a thermal fly-height control means in the air bearing slider near the read/write transducers for placing the transducers within 1 to 2 nm of the rotating disk. In order to monitor this near contact spacing, this system also uses an embedded contact sensor (ECS). Here, we investigate how this ECS can be used to study the heat transfer across the nanoscale gap between the read/write transducer and the disk. This study shows that the self heating effect of the ECS is strong when its current bias is too high. But this self heating effect can be isolated from other heat sources, which allows us to use the ECS for the desired heat transfer measurements. The experiments show that the heat transfer across the HDI is a strong function of the head-disk spacing.