Sergey Demokritov, Burkard Hillebrands

• An overview of the current status of the study of spin wave excitations in arrays of magnetic dots and wires is given. We describe both the status of theory and recent inelastic light scattering experiments addressing the three most important issues: the modification of magnetic properties by patterning due to shape aniso-tropies, anisotropic coupling between magnetic islands, and the quantization of spin waves due to the in-plane confinement of spin waves in islands.