Laser-induced local heating of moving multilayer media

Earlier work on the local heating of stationary multilayer structures by focused laser light has been extended to deal with nonstationary situations. The numerical procedures described here are therefore applicable to many important technologies including optical recording, thermal marking, and laser annealing. We demonstrate this in two examples, namely, the effects of readout intensity on the readout signal from a quadrilayer magnetooptic disk and the writing threshold for ablative materials in single-layer and three-layer structures.