  We demonstrate optical nonthermal excitation of exchange dominated spin waves
of different orders in a magnetophotonic crystal. The magnetophotonic structure
consists of a thin magnetic film and a Bragg stack of nonmagnetic layers to
provide a proper nonuniform interference pattern of the inverse Faraday effect
induced by light in the magnetic layer. We found a phenomenon of the pronounced
phase slippage of the inverse Faraday effect distribution when the pump
wavelength is within the photonic band gap of the structure. It allows to tune
the interference pattern by a slight variation of light wavelength which
results in the modification of excitation efficiency of the different order
spin waves. The approach can be applied for different magnetic dielectrics
expanding their application horizons for spin-wave based devices.
