Effective dynamics for ferromagnetic thin films

In a ferromagnetic material, the dynamics of the relaxation process are affected by the presence of a strong shape or material anisotropy. In this article, we systematically explore this fact to derive the effective dynamical equation for a soft ferromagnetic thin film. We show that, as a consequence of the interplay between shape anisotropy and damping, the gyromagnetic term is effectively also a damping term for the in-plane components of the magnetization distribution. We validate our result through numerical simulation of the original Landau-Lifshitz equation and our effective equation. (C) 2001 American Institute of Physics.