Damping of dipole-exchange spin waves in ferromagnetic thin films at elevated temperatures

A non-bosonic technique, based on the drone-fermion perturbation method and a high-density expansion, is employed to study the spin-wave (SW) scattering processes in a ferromagnetic thin film with exchange and dipole-dipole interactions. Specifically, the diagrammatic contributions to the spin-spin Green's functions are evaluated within a 1/zperturbation expansion, wherezis the number of spins interacting with any given spin. The results are used to calculate the SW damping at temperatures below the Curie temperatureT_C. It is found that, apart from the usual contributions due to three-magnon and four-magnon processes in the film, which are dominant at relatively low temperatures (consistent with boson expansion methods), there is an additional mechanism that becomes important for temperatures above about12TCThis is spin disorder damping, previously studied in bulk magnetic materials; it occurs when a spin wave is scattered by the instantaneous disorder produced when a longitudinal spin component undergoes a large thermal fluctuation. Numerical estimates are presented for thin films of Permalloy and EuO.