Abstract

An ultra high density recording with scanning probe microscopes (SPMs) has been studied extensively in recent years to overcome the limits in optical and magnetic storage devices (1-3). In the SPMs, a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and a scanning near-field optical microscope (SNOM) are not considered suitable for high speed recording operations, because they require precise control of the distance between the probe and the storage media at a nanometer scale using a feedback control system. On the other hand, an atomic force microscope (AFM) does not require the precise control if the surface of storage media is smooth at a nanometer scale, because its probe is mounted on a flexible cantilever and touches the media with an extremely weak force. In this paper, we describe an erasable recording technique with the AFM by locally controlling the conductance of phase change media without a topographic change.

© 1996 Optical Society of America