Pierre-Olivier Jubert of Western Digital will review the design and characterization of media used in heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR).

Thursday Apr 2, 2026 6:30–8:00 PM PT Hybrid Meeting Online or at Quadrant San Jose, CA REGISTER

Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) is being introduced in hard disk drives to enable areal densities beyond those achievable with enhanced perpendicular magnetic recording (e-PMR) technology. HAMR uses a write process in which the granular FePt medium is locally heated via a laser-coupled near-field transducer (NFT) to about 400 °C.

High areal density is achieved by combining steep temperature gradients at written transition locations with a recording layer that has low switching distributions. Media design plays a critical role in both aspects.

In this presentation, Pierre-Olivier Jubert will discuss key aspects of HAMR media design and focus on characterization methods developed to extract the distributions of HAMR media at recording time scales.

Agenda:

Speaker:

Pierre-Olivier Jubert, Senior Technologist in the Media Characterization team at Western Digital, works on the development and evaluation of advanced magnetic recording technologies. He earned his PhD from the University of Grenoble, France in 2001 in the field of epitaxial growth and nanomagnetism.

He worked for four years at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory before transferring to the IBM Almaden Research Center in 2005. Pierre-Olivier joined HGST Research in 2014 and the HAMR media development team in 2016.

His research has focused on magnetic recording physics and on the numerical modeling and measurement of advanced recording technologies for tape and hard disk drives. His current work concentrates on HAMR media optical and thermal design, modeling, and characterization.