V. H. Crespi

Energy minimization and ac demagnetization in a nanomagnet array.

We study ac demagnetization in frustrated arrays of single-domain ferromagnetic islands, exhaustively resolving every (Ising-like) magnetic degree of freedom in the systems. Although the net moment of the arrays is brought near zero by a protocol with sufficiently small step size, the final magnetostatic energy of the demagnetized array continues to decrease for finer-stepped protocols and does not extrapolate to the ground-state energy. The resulting complex disordered magnetic state can be described by a maximum-entropy ensemble constrained to satisfy just nearest-neighbor correlations.

Comparing artificial frustrated magnets by tuning the symmetry of nanoscale permalloy arrays

We study the impact of geometry on magnetostatically frustrated single-domain nanomagnet arrays. We examine square and hexagonal lattice arrays, as well as a brickwork geometry that combines the anisotropy of the square lattice and the topology of the hexagonal lattice. We find that the more highly frustrated hexagonal lattice allows for the most thorough minimization of the magnetostatic energy, and that the pairwise correlations between moments differ qualitatively between hexagonal and brickwork lattices, although they share the same lattice topology. The results indicate that the symmetry of local interaction is more important than overall lattice topology in the accommodation of frustrated interactions.