SBIR Phase I: Thermally Durable Plasmonic Near Field Transducer for Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording

The broader impacts/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project are to enable ultra-high capacity disk drives. The explosion of global digital data and the need to store it is continuing to drive demand for disk storage. Approximately 550 million drives are sold each year with a value of about $35B. The greater storage densities created by heat assisted magnetic recording will drive down the cost of storage per Terabyte and greatly reduce the physical and thermal footprints in data centers. A 10X greater drive capacity translates to an approximate 90% reduction in the number of drives required for any given storage requirement. This will greatly reduce facility utility costs and emissions associated with housing, powering and cooling data centers. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to solve critical issues in heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology for next-generation of ultra-high capacity disk drives. High data storage densities achievable with HAMR technology are expected to radically improve drive storage capacities through much greater densities. However, durable near field transducers (NFTs) are critical components that must be realized before commercialization of the devices is possible. Plasmonic materials with refractory properties are natural candidates for durable NFTs. In-depth comprehensive understanding of the connection between thermal cyclic load, oxidation, stoichiometry, crystalline structure and plasmonic properties for the plasmonic ceramics at nanoscale requires sufficient scientific and experimental support. Numerical simulations, optical characterization and advanced electron microscopy techniques will be employed to investigate the performance of plasmonic ceramics with refractory properties as reliable NFTs for HAMR technology.