Thermal stability of optical near field transducers is an important issue for heat-assisted magnetic
recording (HAMR), which affects HAMR system lifetime. In this paper, dark-field scattering spectroscopy
was used to study the stability of nanometer-scaled Au lollipop transducers that were subjected
to thermal annealing. Variation in relative peak intensity and red-shifting in peak position can be
observed in scattering spectra for transducer after annealing. Based on the optical characterizations on
Au thin films and calculations of Mie scattering by finite-difference time domain simulations, the
measured changes in transducer scattering properties can reflect annealing-induced variations in optical
properties and dimensional feature size for the Au lollipop transducer. Dark-field scattering spectroscopy
can be a promising method to examine HAMR near field transducer thermal stability.
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Copyright (2015) American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics. The following article appeared in J. Appl. Phys. 117, 17D132 (2015) and may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4916997.