Experimental studies of noise autocorrelation in thin film media

Noise voltage autocorrelation in thin film media has been experimentally studied in the time domain. Unlike a spectral measurement, the time domain noise autocorrelation function provides a good characterization of non-stationary noise that is particularly useful for thin film media. A new measurement technique is developed to eliminate the noise due to the lack of noise-free timing reference. An empirical eigenfunction expansion is applied to the measured noise autocorrelation matrix to identify possible physical mechanisms for the noise modes and eliminate alignment jitter. The noise autocorrelation function is reconstructed by using only the leading noise modes.