Monolithically Fabricated Hybrid Head for Near-Field Assisted Magnetic Recording

In this paper, we show a monolithically fabricated hybrid head with a GaAs-based laser diode capable of near-field-assisted magnetic recording. A bottlenecked conductor was placed beside the laser cavity formed on the trailing side of the head. The bottlenecked structure is used as a generator of magnetic and near fields. The structure consists of a couple of opposite electrodes with a 200-nm gap and a bridge connection between the electrodes. The magnetic field is mainly generated around the bottleneck by feeding current through the conductor. The near field is produced along edges of the bottleneck by irradiating a laser beam. We confirmed the 3-D localization of near field in the nanometer size around the bottleneck by means of a near-field scanning optical microscope. We attained the nanosized overlap between magnetic filed and near-field distributions on the hybrid head with the laser diode.