Side-Track Erasure Processes in Perpendicular Recording

In perpendicular recording, substantial erasure of the stored data patterns could occur during writing process. Among all those erasure processes, the sidetrack erasure (STE) is one of the critical erasure issues. To sort out the intrinsic characteristics of the STE process and deepen our understanding of the underlying physics in the erasure processes, in this work, we have experimentally investigated the general attributes of STE process in various situations and quantified some of its distinctive signatures as well as some of its origins. Particularly, some STE behaviors have been characterized thoroughly by employing both the amplitude and BER based STE measurement methods in combination with other unique characterization techniques, in order to unambiguously reveal some of inherent features of the STE processes.