All-optical production of a degenerate Fermi gas.
We achieve degeneracy in a mixture of the two lowest hyperfine states of 6Li by direct evaporation in a CO2 laser trap, yielding the first all optically produced degenerate Fermi gas. More than 10(5) atoms are confined at temperatures below 4 microK at full trap depth, where the Fermi temperature for each state is 8 microK. This degenerate two-component mixture is ideal for exploring mechanisms of superconductivity ranging from Cooper pairing to Bose-Einstein condensation of strongly bound pairs.
Granade
S R
SR
Physics Department, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708-0305, USA.
Gehm
M E
ME
O'Hara
K M
KM
Thomas
J E
JE