Very short and well shaped magnetic field pulses can be generated using ultra-relativistic electron bunches at Stanford Linear Accelerator. These fields of several Tesla with duration of several picoseconds are used to study the response of magnetic materials to a very short excitation. Precession of a magnetic moment by 90 degrees in a field of 1 Tesla takes about 10 picoseconds, so we explore the range of fast switching of the magnetization by precession. Our experiments are in a region of magnetic excitation that is not yet accessible by other methods. The current table top experiments can generate fields longer than 100 ps and with strength of 0.1 Tesla only.; Two types of magnetic were used, magnetic recording media and model magnetic thin films. Information about the magnetization dynamics is extracted from the magnetic patterns generated by the magnetic field. The shape and size of these patterns are influenced by the dissipation of angular momentum involved in the switching process.; The high-density recording media, both in-plane and perpendicular type, shows a pattern which indicates a high spin momentum dissipation. The perpendicular magnetic recording media was exposed to multiple magnetic field pulses. We observed an extended transition region between switched and non-switched areas indicating a stochastic switching behavior that cannot be explained by thermal fluctuations.; The model films consist of very thin crystalline Fe films on GaAs. Even with these model films we see an enhanced dissipation compared to ferromagnetic resonance studies. The magnetic patterns show that damping increases with time and it is not a constant as usually assumed in the equation describing the magnetization dynamics. The simulation using the theory of spin-wave scattering explains only half of the observed damping. An important feature of this theory is that the spin dissipation is time dependent and depends on the large angle between the magnetization and the magnetic field.
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