High-purity sol-gel solutions have been developed to coat the interior surface of glass vessels used for polarizing ~3He by spin-exchange optical pumping. Such cells have been shown to exhibit ~3He longitudinal lifetimes T_1 in excess of 350 hours. The sol-gel technique was designed to minimize spin-relaxation due to wall collisions so that only dipole-dipole interactions between colliding ~3He atoms dominate in the relaxation process. Until now, sol-gel technology had not been applied to high pressure ~3He gas targets used in nuclear scattering experiments. A description of the sol-gel technique and recent developments on its integration into the production of ~3He targets will be presented.
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