Characterization of Head Stability Induced Signal Fluctuation

Abstract

The magnetic domains in the core of a recording head often degrade the reproducibility of read back signal. The domain configuration may change unpredictably after the head is excited by write current and the read back signal may change after each write. This random phenomenon can be statistically characterized as noise. This paper presents a study of this averaged signal fluctuation in terms of its autocorrelation function, i.e. the power and the correlation. We found that the noise magnitude is largest near the signal peak and the noise correlation is not -1 at positive and negative peaks. © 1990 IEEE