Measurements of media jitter down to 0.2 mu m track widths

The design of high areal density recording systems requires a detailed unde rstanding of how the signal-to-noise ratio depends on the system geometry. We have made measurements using various head-media combinations of the vari ation of the media jitter with recorded track width. An analogy is made bet ween the width of these recorded micro tracks and an equivalent reader widt h. 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 expon ents 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 profile s of the heads used in the measurement. (C) 1999 American Institute of Phys ics. [S0021-8979(99)30808-2].