Magnetic nanostructures have been widely studied due to their potential applicability into several research fields such as data storage, sensing and biomedical applications. Focusing on the biomedical aspect, some new approaches deserve to be mentioned: cell manipulation and separation, contrast-enhancing agents for magnetic resonance imaging, and magnetomechanically induced cell death. This work focuses on understanding three different magnetic nanostructures, disks in the vortex state, synthetic antiferromagnetic particles and nanowires, first, by explaining their interesting properties and how they behave under an applied external field, before reviewing their potential applications for each of the aforementioned techniques.

Magnetic nanostructures have been widely studied due to its poten¬tial applicability into several research fields such as data storage, sensing and biomedical applications. In this work, micromagnetic simulations (mumax3) of sub-micron iron discs are performed for different normalized inter-dot distance (distance/diameter), to better understand the magnetic behaviour of these nanos-tructures. Two sets of samples were studied: ideal circular discs and disc-shaped nanostructures (based on images of real samples). By analyzing the nucleation and annihilation fields and the magnetic susceptibility, it was found that the (ideal) discs could be considered as isolated for inter-dot distances greater than twice the raidus of the disc (2R). The difference in the shape of the disc-shaped nanostructures resulted in an in-plane anisotropy, noticeable on the hysteresis loops for different directions.