Improvement of Shock Resistance for Solid Immersion Lens-Based Near Field Recording System Using Air-Bearing Surface

A solid immersion lens (SIL)-based near-field recording (NFR) device is regarded as the next-generation optical storage device that can achieve an areal density of more than 100 Gbyte/in. 2 . However, the NFR system is very weak to external shock because of the extremely small gap between the SIL and the disc. To solve this problem, we proposed a new method of using an air-bearing surface (ABS) to avoid collision between the SIL and the disc, and investigated the effect of the ABS on shock resistance in our previous study. In our current study, we optimize an initial ABS model using the results of our previous study and achieve an optimal ABS model with an improved shock resistance. We also verify the improvement of shock resistance for the optimal ABS model by finite element (FE) analysis, by applying the ABS model to a gap servo control system, and by experimental shock testing.