  A Green's function technique for a modified Ising model in a transverse field
is applied, which allows to calculate the damping of the elementary excitations
and the phase transition temperature of ferroelectric thin films with
structural defects. Based on an analytical expression for the damping function,
we analyze its dependence on temperature, film thickness and interaction
strength numerically. The results demonstrate that defect layers in
ferroelectric thin films, layers with impurities or vacancies as well as layers
with dislocations are able to induce a strong increase of the damping due to
different exchange interactions within the defect layers. The results are in
good agreement with experimental data for thin ferroelectric films with
different thickness.
