Analysis of Magnetic Dipole Fixed Lattice Structure

For most materials, electron spin coupling plays the dominant role in determining the arrangement of atoms or molecules in a lattice. For some, the magnetic dipole-dipole interaction may play a role as well. By fixing macroscopic magnetic dipoles in position and allowing them to rotate freely in three dimensions, the ground state characteristics of lattices for which the magnetic dipole-dipole interaction is dominant may be analyzed. The behavior observed here is thus useful for studying the behavior of lattices for which some combination of the magnetic dipole-dipole interaction and spin coupling determine the orientation of particles in a lattice. This behavior is observed both experimentally and computational for two-dimensional lattices of various structure and size