Assembly and evaluation of a SIL optical head for cover-layered incident NFR without disk contact with the bottom surface of a SIL

In the assembly of the solid immersion lens (SIL) optical head for cover-layered incident near-field recordings (NFRs), disk contact with the bottom surface of the SIL has previously been regarded as essential. This is because SIL optical heads are designed to interface with a cover layer. However, SILs can be contaminated and damaged by this contact. We present a new SIL optical head assembly method for cover-layered incident NFRs without disk contact with the bottom surface of the SIL. To achieve this, we added zoom optics to a Twyman–Green interferometer in the measurement beam optical path. Our assembly method eliminates SIL contamination problems and the assembly procedure becomes simple because of removing the disk contact process. In addition, it is not necessary to consider the aberrations induced by disk tilt and cover-layer thickness variation. The SIL optical head assembled by the proposed method has good optical performance satisfying the optical tolerances and the measured wavefront aberration is good agreement with simulations.