Slider vibration reduction using slider surface texture

Abstract

Surface texture with a height of 4.5 nm was fabricated on two types of pico-sliders using argon plasma etching. The nominal flying height of the sliders was 5 and 7 nm, respectively. Laser Doppler vibrometry (LDV) was used to investigate the dynamics of the textured and untextured sliders during steady-state flying and during contact start/stop (CSS). During steady-state flying, the texture was found to significantly reduce both rigid body slider vibration modes and air-bearing modes. During CSS, the amplitude of both out-of-plane and in-plane vibrations was found to be reduced as a consequence of the texture on the slider surfaces.

A Model of Adhesion Excited Micro-vibrations

“…Indeed, there are experimental results in the literature, which support this view. In studies on the hard disk head/disk interface [15,16] a significant reduction of vibrations of a textured slider compared to a slider without texture was observed. This reduction of vibrations is usually attributed to the reduced friction of the textured surface, with the implicit assumption that low friction generates low vibrations and high friction-high vibrations.…”

“…If the number of counts follows a Poisson distribution, then the interval between individual counts follows the exponential distribution. This fact is used to simulate a junction ''birth'' at random sliding distance interval u j from the exponential distribution with mean value given in (16).…”