Simulated floating zone method

TL;DR

The paper introduces the simulated floating zone (SFZ) method, an efficient simulation technique inspired by crystal growth methods, to achieve thermal equilibrium states and suppress domain formation in complex magnetic systems.

Contribution

It presents the SFZ method as a novel simulation approach that improves convergence to equilibrium by local heating and shifting, reducing domain formation in magnetic simulations.

Findings

SFZ method effectively suppresses domain formation.

SFZ accelerates the optimization of magnetic states.

Efficiency peaks when local heating matches the system's energy scale.

Abstract

This paper provides the simulated floating zone (SFZ) method that is an efficient simulation technique to obtain thermal equilibrium states, especially useful when domain formation prevents the system from reaching a spatially-uniform stable state. In the SFZ method, the system is heated up locally, and the heated region is steadily shifted, similar to the floating zone method for growing a single crystal with less lattice defect and impurity in experiments. We demonstrate that the SFZ method suppresses domain formation and accelerates the optimization of the state, taking an example of a magnetic vortex crystal state realized in itinerant magnets. We show that the efficiency is maximized when the local heating temperature is tuned to be comparable to the characteristic energy scale of the ordered state.