Resonance paramagnetic relaxation and alignment of small grains

We show that the energy-level splitting that arises from grain rotation ens ures that paramagnetic dissipation acts at its maximum rate, i.e., the cond itions for paramagnetic resonance are automatically fulfilled. We refer to this process as "resonance relaxation." The differences between the predict ions of classical Davis-Greenstein relaxation and resonance relaxation are most pronounced for grains rotating faster than 1 GHz, i.e., in the domain in which classical paramagnetic relaxation is suppressed. This mechanism ca n partially align even very small grains, resulting in linearly polarized m icrowave emission that could interfere with efforts to measure the polariza tion of the cosmic microwave background.