A Crank-Nicolson scheme for the Landau-Lifshitz equation without damping

Abstract

An accurate and efficient numerical approach, based on a finite difference method with Crank-Nicolson time stepping, is proposed for the Landau-Lifshitz equation without damping. The phenomenological Landau-Lifshitz equation describes the dynamics of ferromagnetism. The Crank-Nicolson method is very popular in the numerical schemes for parabolic equations since it is second-order accurate in time. Although widely used, the method does not always produce accurate results when it is applied to the Landau-Lifshitz equation. The objective of this article is to enumerate the problems and then to propose an accurate and robust numerical solution algorithm. A discrete scheme and a numerical solution algorithm for the Landau-Lifshitz equation are described. A nonlinear multigrid method is used for handling the nonlinearities of the resulting discrete system of equations at each time step. We show numerically that the proposed scheme has a second-order convergence in space and time. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.