Design of Highly Efficient Plasmonic Waveguide and Antenna for Thermally Assisted Magnetic Recording

Abstract

  Highly efficient coupling between light sources and plasmon antennas is extremely important to achieve successful thermally assisted magnetic recording. The energy efficiency obtained from combining a plasmonic waveguide (PW) with a surface plasmon antenna was studied. It was found that the efficiency of light energy propagation was improved from 0.5 to 18.8% by combining the PW and the surface plasmon antenna. It was also clarified that the incident angle of light into the PW as well as the layer structure of the PW were critical to the efficiency of the optics.