High-Speed and Precise Gap Servo System for Near-Field Optical Recording

We propose a high-speed and precise gap servo control system that is based on the feed-forward control method that can reduce the harmonic disturbance (RHD-FFC) on a near-field optical recording system with a solid immersion lens. An optical disk of 1.2 mm thickness rotates with about 30 µmp–p of axial run-out. The axial run-out prevents a gap servo from performing precisely at high rotational speed. The RHD-FFC method can suppress harmonic disturbances of gap error signal and can perform at high speed while keeping less than 25 nm of gap length between an optical head and a rotational disk surface. We confirmed that the gap servo applying the RHD-FFC method performed precisely and achieved at high disk rotational speed of 11000 rpm with a 1.2-mm-thick optical disk with a track pitch of 0.16 µm, corresponding to a data capacity of 100 Gbyte.