High-density-speed optical near-field recording-reading with a pyramidal silicon probe on a contact slider

We demonstrate high-density-speed phase-change recording-reading by use of a pyramidal silicon structure. The contact slider, which has a pyramidal silicon probe array with height dispersion of less than 10 nm, is fabricated by use of a silicon-on-insulator wafer. By illumination with a laser beam (lambda = 830 nm) of one element of the probe array, we find the shortest phase-change mark length and the carrier-to-noise ratio to be 110 nm and 10 dB, respectively, corresponding to a data transmission rate of 2.0 MHz. This rate can be increased to 200 MHz by use of all elements of the probe array. (C) 2000 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: 210.0210, 220.4000.