A micromagnetic study of the hysteretic behavior of antidot Fe films

We report on the results of a micromagnetic study of the magnetization reversal process taking place in square arrays of antidots lithographed in Fe thin films. Our study focuses on the influence on the reversal process of the antidot diameter and the distance between adjacent antidots. It is shown that the minimization of the dipolar energy term of the total system energy originates inhomogeneous moment distributions at the antidot surfaces, and that these structures and their coupling rule the reversal process. We also show that the variation of the interantidot distance in the range of a few units of the exchange length allows varying the coercive force value by a factor of four approximately.