Spin Waves in Sodium and Potassium

The observation of spin-wave excitations originating in the conduction electrons of sodium and potassium metal is presented. The qualitative behavior of these spin-wave signals is given along with a detailed comparison of the experimental data with the theory (of spin waves) as derived by Platzman and Wolff. It is shown that with the aid of the theory, it is possible to extract information from the data which leads to the first two Legendre coefficients of the spin part of the Landau correlation function for a Fermi liquid. A discussion is given on how present uncertainties in these two coefficients can be substantially reduced in future work.