Power delivery and self-heating in nanoscale near field transducer for heat-assisted magnetic recording

To keep increasing the storage density in next-generation hard disk drives, heat-assisted magnetic recording is being developed where a nanoscale near field transducer (NFT) locally and temporally heats a sub-diffraction-limited region in the recording medium to reduce the magnetic coercivity. This allows the use of very small grain in the medium while still maintaining data thermal stability. Plasmonic nanostructures made of apertures or antennas are good candidates for NFTs because of their capability of subwavelength light manipulation in optical frequencies. The NFT must simultaneously deliver enough power to the recording medium with as small as possible incident laser power to reduce self-heating in the NFT, which could cause thermal expansion and materials failure that lead to degradation of the overall hard drive performance. In this work, we study the effect of optical properties on the power delivery efficiency of nanoscale bowtie aperture antennas, with the presence of a recording media stack. Heat dissipation and temperature rise in the NFT are also computed to investigate their dependence on materials' properties. The possibility of using alternative plasmonic materials for delivering higher power and/or reducing heating in NFTs is discussed. (paper)