Fabrication and characterization of nano-aperture VCSELS for 10 Tb/in2 magnetic storage densities

The goal of this work is to determine the possibility of using nano-aperture VCSELs in heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) applications. The VCSELs in this work, specifically, are primarily used as miniature testbeds for characterizing near field transducer designs. We have fabricated 850 nm VCSELs with large arrays of differently shaped nano-apertures in the gold layer on top of each VCSEL and used statistical methods to obtain reliable indicators of performance of each aperture. The focusing and transmission characteristics of differently shaped nano-apertures are compared by both simulation and experiment.