Materials for heat-assisted magnetic recording. Increasing the density of data storage in hard-disk drives is crucial to the future of inexpensive digital technology. Heat-assisted magnetic recording achieves this using heat from a laser beam confined well below the diffraction limit to write to media with high magnetic anisotropy that would normally be unwriteable under magnetic fields. On the cover, the right section shows an electron micrograph of a “lollipop” near-field transducer (NFT) and granular media separated by typical head-media spacing. The left section shows the computed electric field in the transducer and interface with the resulting temperature increase in the media. Laser illumination of the NFT is shown schematically by wave oscillations in the upper left. The top right NFT is from Seagate Technology, and the bottom right section of media is from K. Hono, National Institute for Materials Science. The left section is courtesy of Ali Ghoreyshi, University of Minnesota. See the technical theme that begins on page 87.