Rare-earth iron garnet thin films are widely used in magnonics and spintronics because of their insulating nature and unique magnetic properties, such as low Gilbert damping and a tunable magnetic anisotropy. However, these properties are mostly restricted to single-crystalline films grown on specific substrates like ${\mathrm{Gd}}_3{\mathrm{Sc}}_2{\mathrm{Ga}}_3{\mathrm{O}}_{12}$ (GSGG), limiting their applications. Lateral crystallization is a powerful technique enabling the design of new garnet heterostructures, with the potential to overcome these limitations. We demonstrate the crystallization of a thulium iron garnet film on top of a thin Pt layer, which is deposited on a GSGG substrate. Hereby, a hole pattern in the Pt layers acts as a crystallization seed, resulting in a single-crystalline garnet film extending onto the Pt layer. The hole pattern in combination with a lateral crystallization rate of about $18\mathrm{nm}/\min$ allows crystallization of large areas by post-deposition annealing at $700{}^{\circ }\mathrm{C}$ for a few hours. The resulting garnet film exhibits properties comparable to epitaxially grown films without an interlayer, with a Gilbert damping as low as 0.008. Therefore, lateral crystallization of garnet thin films can open up new possibilities for designing high-quality garnet/metal heterostructures, in particular for spintronic applications.

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• Crystallization
• Spintronics
• Ferrimagnets
• Magnetic thin films
• Electron diffraction
• Ferromagnetic resonance
• X-ray diffraction