(CANCELED) Conformation and fundamental properties of novel lubricant TA-30 for near contact magnetic recording
N. Tagawa, H. Tani
Kansai University, JP
Keywords: hard disk drives, head-disk interface, lubricant, AFM, molecular conformation, DLC, surface energy
Abstract:A novel perfluoropolyether (PFPE) lubricant called TA-30 has been developed recently. The use of TA-30 can lead to an improvement in the head-disk interface (HDI) reliability at low fly height conditions because of the low friction and low surface energy. In this study, we have investigated the conformation of TA-30 on diamond-like carbon (DLC) thin films. We also have studied the fundamental properties of a TA-30 lubricant film and discussed the mechanisms responsible for the good tribological performances of TA-30. As a result, it was found that the conformation of TA-30 is quite different from that of Ztetraol2000, and it adsorbs parallelly on the DLC surface with double layers. The thickness of the first and second layers is approximately 0.9 nm and 1.4 nm, respectively. In addition, it was suggested that TA-30 has a thinner film thickness than Ztetraol2000 and the second-layer lubricant molecules of TA-30 play a very important role as mobile lubricant fractions, resulting in a very-low-friction and very-low-spacing HDI.