Rapid-melting experiments on polarized ³He

Abstract

We report experiments on polarized liquid 3 He by using the technique of rapid melting of highly polarized solid 3 He. We describe our experimental setup and discuss the production of solid polarized 3 He by a slow compression and the subsequent production of liquid polarized 3 He by a fast decompression. We conclude that it is by no means straightforward to extract thermodynamic quantities by measuring the melting-curve lowering in rapid-melting experiments. On the other hand, we have obtained moderately polarized liquid 3 He (10–20%) at 40 mK with a relaxation time as large as 1000 s, which raises good hopes for the production of polarized superfluid 3 He.