Adjacent track aging in heat assisted magnetic recording

Heat assisted magnetic recording(HAMR) is a magnetic recording method that circumvents the superparamagnetic limit by heating the media. We investigate the effects heat leakage will have on the decay of tracks adjacent to the hot spot by measuring the distribution of energy barriers to thermal flipping. The energy barrier distribution width is found to increase with temperature in a medium sample. This effect will result in more decay at adjacent track aging temperatures than would be predicted by the scaling of measurements made at room temperature.