- Micromagnetism
=General=
Micromagnetism deals with the interactions between
magnetic moment s on sub-micrometre length scales. These are governed by several competingenergy terms. "Dipolar" energy is the energy which causesmagnet s to align north tosouth pole . "Exchange" energy will attempt to make the magnetic moments in the immediately surrounding space lie parallel to one another (if the material is ferromagnetic) orantiparallel to one another (if antiferromagnetic). "Anisotropy" energy is low when the magnetic moments are aligned along a particular crystal direction. "Zeeman" energy is at its lowest when magnetic moments lie parallel to an external magnetic field.Since the most efficient magnetic alignment (also known as a "configuration") is the one in which the energy is lowest, these four energy terms will attempt to become as small as possible at the expense of the others, yielding complex physical interactions.
The competition of these interactions under different conditions is responsible for the overall behaviour of a magnetic system.
History
Micromagnetism as a field ("i.e." that which deals specifically with the behaviour of (ferro)magnetic materials at sub-micrometre length scales) was introduced in 1963 when
William Fuller Brown Jr. published a paper on antiparalleldomain wall structure. Until comparatively recently computation micromagnetics has been prohibitively expensive in terms of computational power, but smaller problems are now solveable on a modern desktop PC.Landau-Lifshitz Gilbert equation
Generally, a form of the
Landau-Lifshitz Gilbert equation :dvec{M}over dt} = - |gamma| vec{M} imes vec{H}_{mathrm{eff - {|gamma| alpha over M_s}vec{M} imes (vec{M} imes vec{H}_{mathrm{eff)qquad (1)
is used to solve time-dependent micromagnetic problems, where vec{M} is the magnetic moment per unit volume, vec{H}_{mathrm{eff is the effective
magnetic field , alpha is the Gilbert phenomenological damping parameter and gamma is the electrongyromagnetic ratio .Landau-Lifshitz equation
If in (1) we put alpha =0, then we get the famous
Landau-Lifshitz equation (LLE)dvec{M}over dt} = - |gamma| vec{M} imes vec{H}_{mathrm{eff.qquad (2)
References
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External links
* [http://www.bama.ua.edu/~tmewes/Java/dynamics/MagnetizationDynamics.shtml Magnetization dynamics applet]
ee also
Magnetism
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