Minimum energy versus metastable magnetisation processes in antiferromagnetically coupled ferromagnetic multilayers

The authors report calculations of magnetisation processes in antiferromagnetically coupled ferromagnetic multilayers of uniaxial or cubic in-plane anisotropy, for the hypothesis that the system always finds the state of absolute minimum energy. These calculations are complementary to those reported in their previous paper where the system followed the local energy minimum via coherent rotation of the magnetic moments. Both sets of calculations are used to discuss briefly experimentally measured magnetisation processes in a number of real systems as reported in the literature.