Techniques for reducing adjacent track erasure include: a bucking coil having a lower number of turns than the write coil for bucking out a portion of the field induced by the write coil; a hybrid solenoid coil that includes turns that are in a pancake arrangement and turns that are in a solenoid arrangement; a P2 write pole tip with an increasing amount of flare as the distance from the ABS increases; a notch along an edge of the ABS surface of the P1 write pole adjacent to a tooth that extends closest to the P2 write pole; a back notch adjacent to the tooth on the P1 write pole that has a width generally corresponding to the width of the tooth; and a layered structure on the pole tip of the P1 write pole adjacent to the tooth, the layers having at least one of decreasing amounts of saturation magnetization, decreasing amounts of permeability, or alternating layers of magnetic and nonmagnetic material, where the width of the magnetic and nonmagnetic layers is controlled or the characteristics of the magnetic layers are controlled with regard to saturation magnetization or magnetic permeability to effectively decrease the overall saturation magnetization or permeability.