Magnetostatic bias in Kagome artificial spin ice systems

Abstract

The magnetostatic bias in elongated nanomagnetic elements arranged in artificial Kagome spin ice arrays is studied by micromagnetic simulations. Using the Nmag package the reversal of a given element has been simulated under the influence of its four nearest neighbors with their magnetic states fixed in all possible configurations, which amount to 24=16 states that can be classified under five distinct cases. The hysteresis loop of each element is greatly influenced by the magnetic state of the nearest neighbors, not only by the expected shift due to dipolar interaction bias, but as it regards the loop shape and width itself. This presents a correction to the usual macrospin calculation based on the assumption that the loop is shifted by a biasing field (equal to the local dipole field) but the loop width (and shape in general) does not change. Although coercive and biasing fields depend strongly on the dimensions their relative strength has only weak thickness dependence for a fixed length to width aspect ratio. Therefore the behavior of such arrays is expected to be to a large degree size invariant apart from an appropriate maximum external applied field scaling.