Measurement of the thermal conductivity of erasable phase-change optical recording media

We describe a method to estimate the thermal conductivity of the substrate, the dielectric layer, the phase-change (PC) layer, and the reflective laye r of PC optical recording media. The method relies on the amorphous-to-crys talline phase transition that occurs in the PC layer and takes advantage of the difference in the thermal diffusion behavior under different-sized foc used spots. All the results obtained here are reliable with better than +/- 5% accuracy, which is within the margin of our experimental error. (C) 2000 Optical Society of America. OCIS codes: 210.0210, 210.4590, 210.4770, 210. 4810.