We analyze the spectral properties and dispersion relations for the linearized Fokker-Planck operator in the case of hard
potentials, as in E
llis & P
insky's work [7] on the Boltzmann equation. Results similar to those in [7] are obtained for the Fokker-Planck operator although
the presence of a diffusion operator instead of a multiplication operator introduces many additional technical difficulties.
(Accepted December 7, 1995)