Simulation of power gain and dissipation in field-coupled nanomagnets

Field-coupled computing (also known as quantum cellular automata or QCA) is a novel architecture for processing information on the nanoscale. Recently, nanomagnets were proposed and demonstrated as a possible ´hardware´ for field-coupled computing. In these devices, information is represented by the magnetization state of nanomagnets, while propagation and processing of information is carried out by the magnetic interaction of the dots. A computational study on the power flow and dissipation characteristics of coupled nanomagnets were performed. Magnetization dynamics is calculated by the numerical solution of the Landau-Lifshitz equations. A simple method to determine power flow relations from the simulated time-dependent magnetization and magnetic field distributions was developed. The simulations can be performed either in a full micromagnetic model or using the single-domain approximation.