Normal mode mixing and ferromagnetic resonance linewidth

The normal modes of an inhomogeneous thin film are obtained by diagonalization of the perturbed Hamiltonian. The resulting modes are mixtures of the spin-wave modes and the uniform mode. We find that the ferromagnetic resonance intensity spectrum of the diagonalized system has a Lorentzian profile, and that the results correspond to the two-magnon model for weak perturbations. For stronger perturbations, the density of states is smoothed, and the spectrum becomes asymmetric due to the low-frequency cutoff of the spin-wave manifold. The technique is expected to be valid for perturbation amplitudes that are large enough to invalidate the assumptions of the two-magnon model.