Thermal reversal of elongated ferromagnetic particles misoriented to the applied field

The energy barrier to be overcome for thermal reversal, the reversal mode and the effective particle volume involved are determined by the saddle points of the energy surface. We investigate the influence of field misorientation, exchange-coupling and magnetostatic interaction for a 2:1 aspect ratio particle discretized into two subunits. Typically, increasing the field angle from 0/spl deg/ to 45/spl deg/ enhances the effective volume in both cases by more than 20%.