Shape Dependent Coercivity Simulation of a Spherical Barium Ferrite (S-BaFe) Particle with Uniaxial Anisotropy

The coercivity of a single 27 nm-spherical barium ferrite (S-BaFe) particle was simulated using three models: 1) Gibbs free energy (GFE), 2) Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert (LLG), and 3) Stoner-Wohlfarth (S-W). Spherically and hexagonally shaped particles were used in the GFE and LLG simulations to investigate coercivity with the different shape anisotropies. The effect of shape was not included in the S-W model. It was found that the models using a spherical shape resulted in a coercivity higher than the models using the hexagonal shape with both shapes having the same diameter. The coercivity estimated with the S-W model was approximately the same as that for the spherical-shape models, which indicates that spherical shape has no significant effect on the particle's coercivity at nanoscale.