Rapid-melting experiments on polarized 3He

We report experiments on polarized liquid 3He by using the technique of rapid melting of highly polarized solid 3He. We describe our experimental setup and discuss the production of solid polarized 3He by a slow compression and the subsequent production of liquid polarized 3He 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 3He (10-20%) at 40 mK with a relaxation time as large as 1000 s, which raises good hopes for the production of polarized superfluid 3He. (11 refs., 5 figs.)