Rotational magnetocaloric effect of anisotropic giant spin systems

The magnetocaloric effect, that consists of adiabatic temperature changes in a varying external magnetic field, appears not only when the amplitude is changed, but in cases of anisotropic magnetic materials also when the direction is varied. In this article we investigate the magnetocaloric effect theoretically for the archetypical single molecule magnets Fe8 and Mn12 that are rotated with respect to a magnetic field. We complement our calculations for equilibrium situations with investigations of the influence of non-equilibrium thermodynamic cycles.