Response of a kinetic Ising system to oscillating external fields: Amplitude and frequency dependence

The S=1/2, nearest-neighbor, kinetic Ising model has been used to model magnetization switching in nanoscale ferromagnets. For this model, earlier work based on the droplet theory of the decay of metastable phases and Monte Carlo simulations has shown the existence of a size dependent spinodal field which separates deterministic and stochastic decay regimes. We extend the above work to study the effects of an oscillating field on the magnetization response of the kinetic Ising model. We compute the power spectral density of the time-dependent magnetization for different values of the amplitude and frequency of the external field, using Monte Carlo simulation data. We also investigate the amplitude and frequency dependence of the probability distributions for the hysteresis loop area and the period-averaged magnetization. The time-dependent response of the system is classified by analyzing the behavior of these quantities within the framework of the distinct deterministic and stochastic decay modes mentioned above. (C) 1996 American Institute of Physics.