Measurements of media jitter down to 0.2 μm track widths

The design of high areal density recording systems requires a detailed understanding of how the signal-to-noise ratio depends on the system geometry. We have made measurements using various head-media combinations of the variation of the media jitter with recorded track width. An analogy is made between the width of these recorded micro tracks and an equivalent reader width. The results are then compared with the recording theory expectation that the jitter varies as the inverse square root of the read track width. For the two head-media combinations discussed in this article, the jitter exponents are found to be −0.34 and −0.43, respectively. The deviation from a −0.5 exponent can be correlated to nonuniformities in the micro-track profiles of the heads used in the measurement.