Abstract
A macroscopic equation of motion for the magnetization of a ferromagnet at elevated temperatures should contain both transverse and longitudinal relaxation terms and interpolate between the Landau-Lifshitz equation at low temperatures and the Bloch equation at high temperatures. It is shown that for the classical model where spin-bath interactions are described by stochastic Langevin fields and spin-spin interactions are treated within the mean-field approximation (MFA), such a ``Landau-Lifshitz-Bloch'' (LLB) equation can be derived exactly from the Fokker-Planck equation, if the external conditions change slowly enough. For weakly anisotropic ferromagnets within the MFA the LLB equation can be written in a macroscopic form based on the free-energy functional interpolating between the Landau free energy near TC and the ``micromagnetic'' free energy, which neglects changes of the magnetization magnitude |M|, at low temperatures.

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