Two-dimensional small particles coupled by dipolar interactions

We study the effect of the dipolar coupling on the magnetic properties of two small interacting ferromagnetic particles. Each particle is a two-dimensional array of Ising spins with a central spin surrounded by a variable number of shells. The coupling between spins inside each particle is ferromagnetic and the dipolar interaction between the particles is determined as a function of the number of shells, temperature, and distance between their centers. We investigate the system by mean-field approximation and Monte Carlo simulations. The dipolar interaction is calculated in two ways, one assuming effective spins in the centers of the particles, and the other directly computing the interactions among all the pairs of spins, one in each particle. We show that the difference in the corresponding dipolar energies is a power law on the distance with exponent 5. We calculate the magnetization and susceptibility as a function of temperature, number of shells and distance between the particles’ centers. We show that the critical temperature increases with the number of spins in each particle, and it is more noticeable in the mean-field calculations than in the Monte Carlo simulations.