Continuum limit and stochastic homogenization of discrete ferromagnetic thin films

Andrea Braides, Marco Cicalese, Matthias Ruf

Published 2016-12-08Version 1

We study the discrete-to-continuum limit of ferromagnetic spin systems when the lattice spacing tends to zero. We assume that the atoms are part of a (maybe) non-periodic lattice close to a flat set in a lower dimensional space, typically a plate in three dimensions. Scaling the particle positions by a small parameter $\varepsilon>0$ we perform a $\Gamma$-convergence analysis of properly rescaled interfacial-type energies. We show that, up to subsequences, the energies converge to a surface integral defined on partitions of the flat space. In the second part of the paper we address the issue of stochastic homogenization in the case of random stationary lattices. A finer dependence of the homogenized energy on the average thickness of the random lattice is analyzed for an example of magnetic thin system obtained by a random deposition mechanism.