Owing to the superparamagnetic effect (SPE), areal storage densities achievable by todays magnetic recording technologies are limited to around 500-800 Gbits/in2. In the past few years, the industry has managed to overcome the SPE barrier for more storage capacity. Thermal-assisted atomic force microscope (AFM) based data storage is a new attractive potential solution to supersede magnetic hard disks. This book familiarizes readers to this new data storage technology. Thermal transport in the AFM based data storage system is one of the key factors affecting this technology to...