Abstract
Plasmonic devices are capable of efficiently confining and enhancing optical fields, serving as a bridge between the realm of diffraction-limited optics and the nanoscale. Specifically, a plasmonic device can be used to locally heat a recording medium for data storage. Ideally, the recording medium would consist of individually addressable and non-interacting entities, a configuration that has been regarded as the ultimate future hard-drive technology. Here, we describe a plasmonic nano-antenna that is fully integrated into a magnetic recording head and its use for thermally assisted magnetic recording on both continuous and fully-ordered patterned media using nanosecond pulses in a static tester configuration. In the case of patterned media at 1.5 Pb m−2 (∼1 Tb inch−2) with 24-nm track pitch, we show ideally written bits without disturbing neighbouring tracks. We find a dramatic improvement in track width and optical efficiency compared to continuous media and show that this is largely due to advantageous near-field optical effects.
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Change history
11 June 2010
In the version of this article initially published online, the areal density in the caption for Fig. 5b was incorrectly stated as 1.5 Pb inch−2, when it should have been 1.5 Pb m−2. The error has been corrected for all versions of the article.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank many colleagues who supported this work, including T. Matsumoto, H. Miyamoto, T. Olson, T. Hauet, H. Richter, G. Zeltzer, M. Grobis and R. Payne. A part of this work was funded by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) under the ‘Development of nanobit technology for ultra-high density magnetic recording (Green IT)’ project.
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B.C.S. designed and modelled the integrated plasmonic head, conducted static tester read/write experiments and prepared the manuscript. T.C.S. and C.C.P. designed and developed the light delivery systems, characterized the TAR head, and conducted flying read/write experiments. H.B., T.D.B., J.A.K., J.L. and V.R. fabricated the TAR head. H.N. and A.H. fabricated the continuous media. O.H., R.R., E.D. and D.S.K. fabricated the patterned media. N.R., T.R.A. and B.D.T. guided the team efforts.
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Stipe, B., Strand, T., Poon, C. et al. Magnetic recording at 1.5 Pb m−2 using an integrated plasmonic antenna. Nature Photon 4, 484–488 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2010.90
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2010.90
