Oliver Büttner, Martin Bauer, Serguei Demokritov, Yu.S. Kivshar, V. Grimalsky, Yu. Rapoport, A.N. Slavin

• A new advanced space- and time-resolved Brillouin light scattering (BLS) technique is used to study diffraction of two-dimensional beams and pulses of dipolar spin waves excited by strip-line antennas in tangentially magnetized garnet films. The new technique is an effective tool for investigations of two-dimensional spin wave propagation with high spatial and temporal resolution. Linear effects, such as the unidirectional exci-tation of magnetostatic surface waves and the propagation of backward volume magnetostatic waves (BVMSW) in two preferential directions due to the non-collinearity of their phase and group velocities are investigated in detail. In the nonlinear regime stationary and non-stationary self-focusing effects are studied. It is shown, that non-linear diffraction of a stationary BVMSW beam, having a finite transverse aperture, leads to self-focusing of the beam at one spatial point. Diffraction of a finite-duration (non-stationary) BVMSW pulse leads to space-time self-focusing and formation of a strongly localized two-dimensional wave packet (spin wave bullet). Numerical modeling of the diffraction process by using a variational approach and direct numerical integration of the two-dimensional non-linear Schrödinger equation provides a good qualitative description of the observed phenomena.