Marcus Page

Florian Bruckner, Michael Feischl, Thomas Führer et al.

Various applications ranging from spintronic devices, giant magnetoresistance sensors, and magnetic storage devices, include magnetic parts on very different length scales. Since the consideration of the Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation (LLG) constrains the maximum element size to the exchange length within the media, it is numerically not attractive to simulate macroscopic parts with this approach. On the other hand, the magnetostatic Maxwell equations do not constrain the element size, but cannot describe the short-range exchange interaction accurately. A combination of both methods allows to describe magnetic domains within the micromagnetic regime by use of LLG and also considers the macroscopic parts by a non-linear material law using the Maxwell equations. In our work, we prove that under certain assumptions on the non-linear material law, this multiscale version of LLG admits weak solutions. Our proof is constructive in the sense that we provide a linear-implicit numerical integrator for the multiscale model such that the numerically computable finite element solutions admit weak $H^1$-convergence (at least for a subsequence) towards a weak solution.

L'ubomir Banas, Marcus Page, Dirk Praetorius

We consider a lowest-order finite element discretization of the nonlinear system of Maxwell's and Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equations (MLLG). Two algorithms are proposed to numerically solve this problem, both of which only require the solution of at most two linear systems per timestep. One of the algorithms is fully decoupled in the sense that each timestep consists of the sequential computation of the magnetization and afterwards the magnetic and electric field. Under some mild assumptions on the effective field, we show that both algorithms converge towards weak solutions of the MLLG system. Numerical experiments for a micromagnetic benchmark problem demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithms.

L'ubomir Banas, Marcus Page, Dirk Praetorius et al.

To describe and simulate dynamic micromagnetic phenomena, we consider a coupled system of the nonlinear Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation and the conservation of momentum equation. This coupling allows to include magnetostrictive effects into the simulations. Existence of weak solutions has recently been shown in [Carbout et al. 2011]. In our contribution, we give an alternate proof which additionally provides an effective numerical integrator. The latter is based on lowest-order finite elements in space and a linear-implicit Euler time-stepping. Despite the nonlinearity, only two linear systems have to be solved per timestep, and the integrator fully decouples both equations. Finally, we prove unconditional convergence---at least of a subsequence---towards, and hence existence of, a weak solution of the coupled system, as timestep size and spatial mesh-size tend to zero. Numerical experiments conclude the work and shed new light on the existence of blow-up in micromagnetic simulations.

Michael Feischl, Marcus Page, Dirk Praetorius

In this work, we show the convergence of adaptive lowest-order FEM (AFEM) for an elliptic obstacle problem with non-homogeneous Dirichlet data, where the obstacle χ is restricted only by χ in H^2(Ω). The adaptive loop is steered by some residual based error estimator introduced in Braess, Carstensen & Hoppe (2007) that is extended to control oscillations of the Dirichlet data, as well. In the spirit of Cascon et al. (2008), we show that a weighted sum of energy error, estimator, and Dirichlet oscillations satisfies a contraction property up to certain vanishing energy contributions. This result extends the analysis of Braess, Carstensen & Hoppe (2007) and Page & Praetorius (2010) to the case of non-homogeneous Dirichlet data as well as certain non-affine obstacles and introduces some energy estimates to overcome the lack of nestedness of the discrete spaces.