Robustness Under Mechanical Stress of IrMnCr Heads

It is of increasing importance to understand and measure the effect of damage caused by the contact between the head and disk in magnetic recording system since the head to disk spacing is reduced. In this paper, we developed a new testing method to study the influence of the mechanical stress and studied the mechanical stress robustness of PtMn and IrMnCr heads which have a synthetic ferri-coupled magnetic pinned layer structure with PtMn and IrMnCr antiferro magnetic film. Pinned layer damage types were categorized using high field transfer curves. We found that amplitude degradation is due to pinned layer damage caused by mechanical stress. Mechanical stress robustness of IrMnCr heads is superior to that of PtMn heads