Elastic and inelastic properties of weakly bound
s- and
p-wave molecules of fermionic atoms that collide with a third atom are investigated. Analysis of calculated collisional properties of
s-wave dimers of fermions in different spin states permit us to compare and highlight the physical mechanisms that determine the stability of
s-wave and
p-wave molecules. In contrast to
s-wave molecules, the collisional properties of
p-wave molecules are found to be largely insensitive to variations of the
p-wave scattering length, and these collisions will usually result in short molecular lifetimes. We also discuss the importance of this result for both theories and experiments involving degenerate Fermi gases.
We study collisional loss of a quasi-one-dimensional spin-polarized Fermi gas near a p-wave Feshbach resonance in ultracold ^{6}Li atoms. We measure the location of the p-wave resonance in quasi-1D and observe a confinement-induced shift and broadening. We find that the three-body loss coefficient L_{3} as a function of the quasi-1D confinement has little dependence on confinement strength. We also analyze the atom loss with a two-step cascade three-body loss model in which weakly bound dimers are formed prior to their loss arising from atom-dimer collisions. Our data are consistent with this model. We also find a possible suppression in the rate of dimer relaxation with strong quasi-1D confinement. We discuss the implications of these measurements for observing p-wave pairing in quasi-1D.