Abstract
The read/write performance of obliquely oriented Co-O thin-film tapes was investigated with regard to the aniso-tropy dispersion. Highly uniaxial tapes 1 and 2 exhibited considerable output enhancement when recorded with an asymmetric MIG-type head with saturation flux densities on the trailing and leading edge poles of 1.3 T and 1.0 T, respectively. This enhancement is thought to have been causedby the asymmetry of the head field in relation to the gap center, with a larger field gradient on the trailing side, resulting in a narrower transition width. On the other hand, output enhancement with the asymmetric head was not observed in tape 3, which had larger anisotropy dispersion. It is suggested that the easy direction of tape 3 curves in the film thickness direction and is oriented more perpendicularly in the surface region of the tape, where demagnetizing action by the head field on the trailing side decreases the effective moment of the recorded bits.
