Efficient all-optical production of large 6Li quantum gases using D1 gray-molasses cooling

We use a gray molasses operating on the D-1 atomic transition to produce degenerate quantum gases of Li-6 with a large number of atoms. This sub-Doppler cooling phase allows us to lower the initial temperature of 10(9) atoms from 500 to 40 mu K in 2 ms. We observe that D-1 cooling remains effective into a high-intensity infrared dipole trap where two-state mixtures are evaporated to reach the degenerate regime. We produce molecular Bose-Einstein condensates of up to 5 x 10(5) molecules and weakly interacting degenerate Fermi gases of 7 x 10(5) atoms at T/T-F < 0.1 with a typical experimental duty cycle of 11 s.