Infrared catastrophe in a two-quasiparticle collision integral

Relaxation of a nonequilibrium state in a disordered metal with a spin-dependent electron energy distribution is considered. The collision integral due to the electron-electron interaction is computed within the approximation of a two-quasiparticle scattering. It is shown that the spin-flip scattering processes with a small energy transfer may lead to the divergence of the collision integral for a quasi one-dimensional wire. This divergence is present only for a spin-dependent electron energy distribution that corresponds to the total electron spin magnetization M = 0 and only for nonzero interaction in the triplet channel. In this case, a nonperturbative treatment of the electron-electron interaction is needed to provide an effective infrared cutoff. The text was submitted by the authors in English. An erratum to this article is available at .