MERRILL: Micromagnetic Earth Related Robust Interpreted Language Laboratory

Complex magnetic domain structures and the energy barriers between them are responsible for pseudo-single-domain phenomena in rock magnetism and contribute significantly to the magnetic remanence of paleomagnetic samples. This article introduces MERRILL, an open source software package for three-dimensional micromagnetics optimized and designed for the calculation of such complex structures. MERRILL has a simple scripting user interface that requires little computational knowledge to use but provides research strength algorithms to model complex, inhomogeneous domain structures in magnetic materials. It uses a finite element/boundary element numerical method, optimally suited for calculating magnetization structures of local energy minima (LEM) in irregular grain geometries that are of interest to the rock and paleomagnetic community. MERRILL is able to simulate the magnetic characteristics of LEM states in both single grains, and small assemblies of interacting grains, including saddle-point paths between nearby LEMs. Here the numerical model is briefly described, and an overview of the scripting language and available commands is provided. The open source nature of the code encourages future development of the model by the scientific community.