LONGITUDINAL SPIN RELAXATION IN DILUTE, POLARIZED FERMI GASES

We consider the calculation of the longitudinal relaxation time T1 in a polarized Fermi system at temperatures T ranging from the degenerate statistics regime to the Boltzmann limit. We include the possibility of arbitrary polarization M of the system. While the low temperature u npolarized system behaves as T-2 as previous calculations have shown, when relaxation takes place in zero external field, polarization leads to substantially smaller values of T1 at low T, because of the openin g up of the phase space between up and down Fermi spheres. For the deg enerate system T1 is dependent on the value of M in contrast to result s in the Boltzmann case.