Patent ID: 8092704

Claim:
A method of fabricating a plasmonic near field source for thermal assisted recording applications in hard disk drives, the method comprising: (a) depositing an insulator layer on a base layer; (b) applying an e-beam resist layer on the insulator layer; (c) performing e-beam lithography and Cr liftoff on the e-beam resist layer to form a pair of parallel hard mask features from Cr separated by a gap of approximately 30 nm; (d) reactive ion etching (RIE) the insulator layer to form a notch therein located below the gap; (e) performing e-beam lithography and liftoff to add a second hard mask over the gap; (f) reactive ion etching the pair of parallel hard mask features to define edges of a structure in the insulator layer; (g) wet etching the structure to remove extraneous hard mask material from the insulator layer; (h) depositing a conductive layer on the structure; and then (i) fabricating a throat of a c-aperture in the structure.