Thermal Aspects and Static/Dynamic Protrusion Behaviors in Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording

The pressure of increasing the areal density of magnetic storage media demands the leap to new storage technologies. Among the prime candidates, available is heat-assisted magnetic recording technology. Among many aspects available in this paper, we will focus on newly introduced thermal aspects and protrusions due to additional heat sources in the recording head and recording media. As needed with the existing head protrusions such as thermal flying height control and writer pole tip protrusion, we will present the data, which is based on thermomechanical modeling and experiments during flying and static conditions. The ongoing debate of comparing flying versus nonflying conditions remains a critical issue but needs to be accepted as an imperfect but valuable way of exploring the new protrusion effects. We will address the important issue of the differences between the pure thermal and the associated mechanical time constants.