Aerodynamic Stabilization of Flexible Optical Disk with Triangularly Arranged Stabilizer System

We have developed a flexible optical disk (FOD) system comprising a flexible disk and stabilizer, which can achieve a small axial runout of the disk through simplified stabilizer control. The approach adopts a new stabilizer system made up of triangularly arranged stabilizers (TASs), which consists of one main stabilizer (MS) that stabilizes the pickup focus area on the disk and two auxiliary stabilizers (ASs) that control the balancing conditions around the MS. We experimentally demonstrated that the TAS system could effectively stabilize a flexible disk even under conditions with no active stabilizer adjustments, such as axial position control and tilt control, which could not be eliminated in our previous single-stabilizer system. The suppressed axial runout without active adjustments was sufficiently small of less than 5 µm at linear velocities from 5.7 to 13.0 m/s up to double the speed of Blu-ray disk system. The results indicated that the FOD system with the TASs, which is easily operated, could be implemented in high-density optical disk systems with a high numerical-aperture (NA) pickup.