Effective anisotropy of thin nanomagnets: beyond the surface anisotropy approach

Abstract

We study the effective anisotropy induced in thin nanomagnets by the nonlocal demagnetization field (dipole-dipole interaction). Assuming a magnetization independent of the thickness coordinate, we reduce the energy to an inhomogeneneous onsite anisotropy. Vortex solutions exist and are ground states for this model. We illustrate our approach for a disk and a square geometry. In particular, we obtain good agreement between spin-lattice simulations with this effective anisotropy and micromagnetic simulations.

ReVTeX, 14 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Fractional vortices and composite domain walls in flat nanomagnets

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Controlled vortex core switching in a magnetic nanodisk by a rotating field
• Controllable switching of vortex chirality in magnetic nanodisks by a field pulse