arXiv:cond-mat/0111344 · Physical Review Letters

All-Optical Production of a Degenerate Fermi Gas

S. R. Granade, Michael E. Gehm, Kenneth M. O’Hara, John E. Thomas

Published Mar 8, 2002• 279 citations

Abstract

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.

DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.88.120405

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