The road to HAMR

Heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) was initially proposed in the 1990's to achieve storage densities not limited by superparamagnetism. The key to HAMR has been to find an efficient near field transducer that can operate with a nearby magnetic recording pole. An integrated HAMR head has now been demonstrated which can record at a track width of 50 nm and an areal density of ∼240 Gb/in 2 on high coercivity FePt media.