Numerical methods for the stray-field calculation: A comparison of recently developed algorithms

Different numerical approaches for the stray-field calculation in the context of micromagnetic simulations are investigated. We compare finite difference based fast Fourier transform methods, tensor-grid methods and the finite-element method with shell transformation in terms of computational complexity, storage requirements and accuracy tested on several benchmark problems. These methods can be subdivided into integral methods (fast Fourier transform methods, tensor-grid method) which solve the stray field directly and in differential equation methods (finite-element method) which compute the stray field as the solution of a partial differential equation. It turns out that for cuboid structures the integral methods, which work on cuboid grids (fast Fourier transform methods and tensor-grid methods), outperform the finite-element method in terms of the ratio of computational effort to accuracy. Among these three methods the tensor-grid method is the fastest for a given spatial discretization. However, the use of the tensor-grid method in the context of full micromagnetic codes is not well investigated yet. The finite-element method performs best for computations on curved structures. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.