Micromagnetics of ferromagnetic/antiferromagnetic nanocomposite materials. I. Towards a mesoscopic approach

In the first of two articles, we present here a mesoscopic micromagnetic approach for simulating materials composed of ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic phases. Starting with the atomistic modeling of quasione-dimensional systems, we explicitly show how the material parameters for the mesoscopic model of an antiferromagnet can be derived. The comparison between magnetization profiles obtained in atomistic and mesoscopic calculations (using a Heusler alloy as an example) proves the validity of our method. This approach opens up the possibility to recover the details of the magnetization distribution in ferromagnetic/antiferromagnetic materials with the resolution of a few nanometers covering length scales up to several hundreds of nanometers.