  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 particles. 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 system
initialization. A simple two-state system description of an ensemble of
clusters is developed which accounts for the observed anomalies. These results
follow from a semi-analytical treatment, and are fully supported by kinetic
Monte-Carlo simulations.
