Studies of bit aspect ratio and areal density using microtracks

With decreasing trackwidth, track density increases while jitter goes up, limiting the linear density. Overall, we expect a gain in areal density with reducing bit aspect ratio (BAR). In order to create narrow trackwidths thereby achieve small BAR, we utilized the microtrack technique. This novel approach enabled us to produce narrow tracks with varying widths without using special heads. We measured the jitter of microtracks, verified jitter dependence on the effective reader width and established the areal density relationship with BAR.