Magnetization boundary conditions at a ferromagnetic interface of finite thickness.

Abstract

We develop a systematic approach to derive boundary conditions at an interface between two ferromagnetic materials in the continuous medium approximation. The approach treats the interface as a two-sublattice material, although the final equations connect magnetizations outside of the interface and therefore do not explicitly depend on its structure. Instead, the boundary conditions are defined in terms of some average properties of the interface, which may also have a finite thickness. In addition to the interface anisotropy and symmetric exchange coupling, this approach allows us to take into account coupling resulting from inversion symmetry breaking in the vicinity of the interface, such as the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya antisymmetric exchange interaction. In the case of negligible interface anisotropy and Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya exchange parameters, the derived boundary conditions represent a generalization of those proposed earlier by Barnaś and Mills and are therefore named 'generalized Barnaś-Mills boundary conditions'. We demonstrate how one could use the boundary conditions to extract parameters of the interface via fitting of appropriate experimental data. The developed theory could be applied to modeling of both linear and non-linear spin waves, including exchange, dipole-exchange, magnetostatic, and retarded modes, as well as to calculations of non-uniform equilibrium micromagnetic configurations near the interface, with a direct impact on the research in magnonics and micromagnetism.