Component Design Considerations for High Areal Density in Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording

To provide useful component design guidance, micromagnetic simulations of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) must include estimates of the areal density (AD) of the recording system. In this work, we investigate the influence of both near field transducer (NFT) and medium design on AD. Exploring a range of medium and NFT designs we demonstrate that once the thermal gradient of the head and medium system is sufficient, the achievable jitter (and hence linear density) is governed by the magnetic properties of the medium. Including readback parameters, we outline requirements for HAMR recording systems capable of achieving >2 Tbpsi in hard disk drives with product margins.