Hamiltonian and Lagrangian Dynamical Matrix Approaches Applied to Magnetic Nanostructures.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Condensed Matter Physics Volume 2012, Article ID 765709, 16 pages doi:10.1155/2012/765709 Review Article Hamiltonian and Lagrangian Dynamical Matrix Approaches Applied to Magnetic Nanostructures Roberto Zivieri1 and Giancarlo Consolo2 1 CNISM Unit of Ferrara and Department of Physics, University of Ferrara, Via Saragat 1, 44122 Ferrara, Italy 2 Department of Sciences for Engineering and Architecture, University of Messina, C.da di Dio, Villaggio S.Agata, 98166 Messina, Italy Correspondence should be addressed to Roberto Zivieri, zivieri@fe.infn.it Received 30 March 2012; Accepted 23 April 2012 Academic Editor: Eduardo Martinez Vecino Copyright © 2012 R. Zivieri and G. Consolo. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Two micromagnetic tools to study the spin dynamics are reviewed. Both approaches are based upon the so-called dynamical matrix method, a hybrid micromagnetic framework used to investigate the spin-wave normal modes of confined magnetic systems. The approach which was formulated first is the Hamiltonian-based dynamical matrix method. This method, used to investigate dynamic magnetic properties of conservative systems, was originally developed for studying spin excitations in isolated magnetic nanoparticles and it has been recently generalized to study the dynamics of periodic magnetic nanoparticles. The other one, the Lagrangian-based dynamical matrix method, was formulated as an extension of the previous one in order to include also dissipative effects. Such dissipative phenomena are associated not only to intrinsic but also to extrins