Collisional Stability of a Three-Component Degenerate Fermi Gas

We report on the creation of a degenerate Fermi gas consisting of a balanced mixture of atoms in three different hyperfine states of Li-6. This new system consists of three distinguishable fermions with different and tunable interparticle scattering lengths a(12), a(13), and a(23). We are able to prepare samples containing 5x10(4) atoms in each state at a temperature of about 215 nK, which corresponds to T/T-F approximate to 0.37. We investigated the collisional stability of the gas for magnetic fields between 0 and 600 G and found a prominent loss feature at 130 G. From lifetime measurements, we determined three-body loss coefficients, which vary over nearly 3 orders of magnitude.