Lightning rod resonance of a plasmonic near-field transducer.

We demonstrate the lightning-rod resonance of a lollipop near-field transducer integrated in magnetic writer for heat-assisted magnetic recording by collecting the two-photon excited photoluminescence (TPL) signal when excited by a pulsed femto-second fiber laser tuned to the desired mode resonance. The lollipop transducer consists of a round disk and a protruding peg to take advantage of the lightning-rod effect. It is found that the TPL signal is extremely sensitive to the peg length where even a 3-5 nm deviation from the optimal peg length halves the TPL signal. This method conveniently quantifies the optical performance of an NFT device in situ as a function of geometry with a resolution of better than the light wavelength (λ) divided by 200.