Research Article

Determining the preferred directions of magnetisation in cubic crystals using symmetric polynomial inequalities

¹ Institute of Ion Beam Physics and Materials Research, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, Bautzner Landstraße 400, 01328 Dresden, Germany
² Institute of Physics, University of Technology Chemnitz, Reichenhainer Str. 70, 09126 Chemnitz, Germany

^* e-mail: fabian.samad@physik.tu-chemnitz.de

Received: 27 August 2022
Accepted: 8 April 2023

Abstract

For a magnetic material, the easy and hard magnetic axes describe the directions of favourable respectively unfavourable alignment of the magnetisation. In this article, we describe how to determine these axes for cubic magnetic crystals. Usually it is assumed without further reasoning that they coincide with some principal symmetry directions of the crystal [Bozorth, Phys. Rev. 50, 1076–1081 (1936)], which is however invalid in general. In contrast, we present a full and elementary analysis using symmetric polynomial inequalities, which are well suited to the symmetry of the problem.