Magnetic damping of ferromagnetic and exchange resonance modes in a ferrimagnetic insulator

Understanding the damping is an important fundamental problem with widespread implications in magnetic technology. Ferrimagnetic materials offer a rich platform to explore not only the damping of the ferromagnetic mode, but also the damping of the high-frequency exchange mode very promising for ultrafast devices. Here we use time-resolved magneto-optical Kerr effect to investigate the ferromagnetic and exchange resonance modes and their damping in the bismuth-doped gadolinium iron garnet over a broad range of magnetic fields (0-10 T) and temperatures (50-300 K) including the magnetization and angular compensation points. These two resonance modes are excited via the inverse Faraday effect and unambiguously identified by their distinct frequency dependence on temperature and magnetic field. The temperature-dependent measurements in the external magnetic field H ext = 2 T revealed that the intrinsic damping of the ferromagnetic mode is always smaller than the one of the exchange modes and both have a maximum near the angular compensation point. These results are fully consistent with recent predictions of atomistic simulations and a theory based on two-sublattice Landau-Lifshitz-Bloch equation. We also demonstrate that the damping of these modes varies differently as a function of H ext. We explain the observed behaviors by considering the different features of the effective fields defining the precession frequencies of the ferromagnetic and exchange modes.