The role of geometrical symmetry on thermally activated processes in clusters of interacting dipolar moments

Thermally activated magnetization decay is studied in ensembles of clusters of interacting dipolar moments by applying the master-equation formalism, as a model of thermal relaxation in systems of interacting single-domain ferromagnetic nanoparticles. Solving the associated master-equation reveals a breakdown of the energy barrier picture depending on the geometrical symmetry of structures. Deviations are most pronounced for reduced symmetry and result in a strong interaction dependence of relaxation rates on the memory of initialization of an ensemble. Developed is a simple two-state system description of an ensemble, which accounts for the observed anomalies. These results follow from a semi-analytical treatment, and are fully supported by kinetic Monte-Carlo simulations.