Interpretation of domain nucleation measurements: Neel phase theory and micromagnetism

The observed conditions for homogeneous second-order stripe domain nucleation in uniaxial garnet films has previously been interpreted by a generalization of Neel's 1946 phase theory that yields values of the anisotropy constants from the observations, We show that a micromagnetic description of the phenomena yields additional detailed predictions of the domain orientation. These can be correlated with the films' anisotropic and magnetoelastic properties. The predicted behavior is consistent with earlier observations reported in the literature, and provides a good description of new measurements reported here.