Unconditional well-posedness and IMEX improvement of a family of predictor-corrector methods in micromagnetics

Recently, Kim & Wilkening (Convergence of a mass-lumped finite element method for the Landau-Lifshitz equation, Quart. Appl. Math., 76, 383-405, 2018) proposed two novel predictor-corrector methods for the Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation (LLG) in micromagnetics, which models the dynamics of the magnetization in ferromagnetic materials. Both integrators are based on the so-called Landau-Lifshitz form of LLG, use mass-lumped variational formulations discretized by first-order finite elements, and only require the solution of linear systems, despite the nonlinearity of LLG. The first(-order in time) method combines a linear update with an explicit projection of an intermediate approximation onto the unit sphere in order to fulfill the LLG-inherent unit-length constraint at the discrete level. In the second(-order in time) integrator, the projection step is replaced by a linear constraint-preserving variational formulation. In this paper, we extend the analysis of the integrators by proving unconditional well-posedness and by establishing a close connection of the methods with other approaches available in the literature. Moreover, the new analysis also provides a well-posed integrator for the Schrödinger map equation (which is the limit case of LLG for vanishing damping). Finally, we design an implicit-explicit strategy for the treatment of the lower-order field contributions, which significantly reduces the computational cost of the schemes, while preserving their theoretical properties

Iterative solution and preconditioning for the tangent plane scheme in computational micromagnetics

The tangent plane scheme is a time-marching scheme for the numerical solution of the nonlinear parabolic Landau–Lifshitz–Gilbert equation, which describes the time evolution of ferromagnetic configurations. Exploiting the geometric structure of the equation, the tangent plane scheme requires only the solution of one linear variational form per time-step, which is posed in the discrete tangent space determined by the nodal values of the current magnetization. We develop an effective solution strategy for the arising constrained linear systems, which is based on appropriate Householder reflections. We derive possible preconditioners, which are (essentially) independent of the time-step, and prove linear convergence of the preconditioned GMRES algorithm. Numerical experiments underpin the theoretical findings

Linear second-order IMEX-type integrator for the (eddy current) Landau–Lifshitz–Gilbert equation

Combining ideas from Alouges et al. (2014, A convergent and precise finite element scheme for Landau–Lifschitz–Gilbert equation. Numer. Math., 128, 407–430) and Praetorius et al. (2018, Convergence of an implicit-explicit midpoint scheme for computational micromagnetics. Comput. Math. Appl., 75, 1719–1738) we propose a numerical algorithm for the integration of the nonlinear and time-dependent Landau–Lifshitz–Gilbert (LLG) equation, which is unconditionally convergent, formally (almost) second-order in time, and requires the solution of only one linear system per time step. Only the exchange contribution is integrated implicitly in time, while the lower-order contributions like the computationally expensive stray field are treated explicitly in time. Then we extend the scheme to the coupled system of the LLG equation with the eddy current approximation of Maxwell equations. Unlike existing schemes for this system, the new integrator is unconditionally convergent, (almost) second-order in time, and requires the solution of only two linear systems per time step

Convergent tangent plane integrators for the simulation of chiral magnetic skyrmion dynamics

We consider the numerical approximation of the Landau–Lifshitz–Gilbert equation, which describes the dynamics of the magnetization in ferromagnetic materials. In addition to the classical micromagnetic contributions, the energy comprises the Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction, which is the most important ingredient for the enucleation and the stabilization of chiral magnetic skyrmions. We propose and analyze three tangent plane integrators, for which we prove (unconditional) convergence of the finite element solutions towards a weak solution of the problem. The analysis is constructive and also establishes existence of weak solutions. Numerical experiments demonstrate the applicability of the methods for the simulation of practically relevant problem sizes

Computational micromagnetics with Commics

We present our open-source Python module Commics for the study of the magnetization dynamics in ferromagnetic materials via micromagnetic simulations. It implements state-of-the-art unconditionally convergent finite element methods for the numerical integration of the Landau–Lifshitz–Gilbert equation. The implementation is based on the multiphysics finite element software Netgen/NGSolve. The simulation scripts are written in Python, which leads to very readable code and direct access to extensive post-processing. Together with documentation and example scripts, the code is freely available on GitLab