English

All-Optical Production of a Degenerate Fermi Gas

Soft Condensed Matter 2009-11-07 v3 Superconductivity

Abstract

We achieve degeneracy in a mixture of the two lowest hyperfine states of 6^6Li by direct evaporation in a CO2_2 laser trap, yielding the first all-optically produced degenerate Fermi gas. More than 10510^5 atoms are confined at temperatures below 4μ4 \muK at full trap depth, where the Fermi temperature for each state is 8μ8 \muK. This degenerate two-component mixture is ideal for exploring mechanisms of superconductivity ranging from Cooper pairing to Bose condensation of strongly bound pairs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0111344,
  title  = {All-Optical Production of a Degenerate Fermi Gas},
  author = {S. R. Granade and M. E. Gehm and K. M. O'Hara and J. E. Thomas},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0111344},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

4 pgs RevTeX with 2 eps figs, to be published in Phys. Rev. Lett