Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The primary focus of the proposed research is the numerical modeling and simulation of equilibrium and non-equilibrium properties of magnetic materials and structures with characteristic dimensions on the nanometer length scale. Examples of such structures include magnetic multilayers, granular magnetic recording media, magnetic nanoparticle arrays and magnonic lattices. These materials and structures are of considerable technical importance in the manufacture and design of current and potential future technologies used in the storing and processing of data.Modelling the properties of the materials described in this proposal is computationally challenging as they can combine processes involving length and time scales that can span several orders of magnitude. A key element of the proposed research is a software package, MagLua, developed by my research group over the last five years. Designed to be highly modular and scalable, Maglua can be deployed on laptops, workstations or large-scale, multinode high performance computers and can significantly outperform similar commercial and open source software packages that are currently used by researchers. The modelling and simulation of these materials and the devices that use them is key to sustaining the exponential increase in capacity and processing power of electronic devices and communications infrastructure that has taken place over the last 50 years. The results, methodologies and software arising from proposed research are therefore of direct technological relevance to manufacturers of magnetic storage systems and to researchers in the area of applied magnetism.