Effect of pole-tip geometry on the flux rise time of write heads

With magnetic recording data transfer rates now in the gigabit-per-second regime, understanding and controlling all of the major write transducer characteristics governing magnetic flux rise time has become imperative. In this paper, we study dependence of the flux rise time on the front-end pole-tip geometry. We examined a set of recording heads differing only in pole-tip shape; the yoke length and width, number of coil turns, and pitch are the same for all designs. We measured the flux rise time by laser-based time-resolved scanning Kerr microscopy and observed that the front-end pole-tip geometry has a strong effect on flux rise time.