All-optical production of a degenerate Fermi gas

We achieve degeneracy in a mixture of the two lowest hyperfine states of Li-6 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 muK at full trap depth, where the Fermi temperature for each state is 8 muK. This degenerate two-component mixture is ideal for exploring mechanisms of superconductivity ranging from Cooper pairing to Bose-Einstein condensation of strongly bound pairs.