Challenge for Near-Field Recording beyond 50 Gbit/inch^2

Abstract

We enabled near-field optical recording by developing a near-field optical head using solid immersion lens (SIL) and airgap servo system in the range of 50nm. The areal recording density of 50 Gbit/inch^2 is expected by the combination of 1.5 Numerical-Aperture (NA) optical head and GaN laser diode as a light source. In this paper, we explain our developed optical pickup and our developed near-field phase-change optical disk, and we report the latest experimental results of challenging the areal density of over 50 Gbit/inch^2.