Advantages of a semi-implicit scheme over a fully implicit scheme for Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation

Abstract

Magnetization dynamics in magnetic materials is modeled by the Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert (LLG) equation. In the LLG equation, the length of magnetization is conserved and the system energy is dissipative. Implicit and semi-implicit schemes have been used in micromagnetics simulations due to their unconditional numerical stability. In more details, implicit schemes preserve the properties of the LLG equation, but solve a nonlinear system of equations per time step. In contrast, semi-implicit schemes only solve a linear system of equations, while additional operations are needed to preserve the length of magnetization. It still remains unclear which one shall be used if both implicit and semi-implicit schemes are available. In this work, using the implicit Crank-Nicolson (ICN) scheme as a benchmark, we propose to make this implicit scheme semi-implicit. It can be proved that both schemes are second-order accurate in space and time. For the unique solvability of nonlinear systems of equations in the ICN scheme, we require that the temporal step size scales quadratically with the spatial mesh size. It is numerically verified that the convergence of the nonlinear solver becomes slower for larger temporal step size and multiple magnetization profiles are obtained for different initial guesses. The linear systems of equations in the semi-implicit CN (SICN) scheme are unconditionally uniquely solvable, and the condition that the temporal step size scales linearly with the spatial mesh size is needed in the convergence of the SICN scheme. In terms of numerical efficiency, the SICN scheme achieves the same accuracy as the ICN scheme with less computational time. Based on these results, we conclude that a semi-implicit scheme is superior to its implicit analog both theoretically and numerically, and we recommend the semi-implicit scheme in micromagnetics simulations if both methods are available.