J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 2 No 1 (8 January 1990) 187-194 

Minimum energy versus metastable magnetisation processes in
antiferromagnetically coupled ferromagnetic multilayers

B Dieny and J P Gavigan
Lab. Louis Neel, CNRS, Grenoble, France

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.