Finite temperature magnon spectra in yttrium iron garnet from a mean field approach in a tight-binding model

We study magnon spectra at finite temperature in yttrium iron garnet using a tight-binding model with nearest-neighbor exchange interaction. The spin reduction due to thermal magnon excitation is taken into account via the mean field approximation to the local spin and is found to be different at two sets of iron atoms. The resulting temperature dependence of the spin wave gap shows good agreement with experiment. We find that only two magnon modes are relevant to the ferromagnetic resonance.