System, method and apparatus for fabricating a c-aperture or e-antenna plasmonic near field source for thermal assisted recording applications

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 in rectangular shapes separated by a gap;
• (d) reactive ion etching (RIE) the insulator layer to form a notch therein located below the gap;
• (e) performing e-beam lithography and Cr liftoff to add a second hard mask over the gap, wherein a formed Cr feature completely covers the notch, but is narrower than outer edges of the pair of parallel hard mask features;
• (f) reactive ion etching the pair of parallel hard mask features to define edges of a structure;
• (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.