Interpretation of domain nucleation measurements: Neel phase theory and micromagnetism

The observed conditions for homogeneous second-order stripe domain nucleation in uniaxial garnet films has previously been interpreted by a generalization of Neel´s 1946 phase theory that yields values of the anisotropy constants from the observations, We show that a micromagnetic description of the phenomena yields additional detailed predictions of the domain orientation. These can be correlated with the films´ anisotropic and magnetoelastic properties. The predicted behavior is consistent with earlier observations reported in the literature, and provides a good description of new measurements reported here.