Preparation of a degenerate, two-component Fermi gas by evaporation in a single beam optical trap

Summary form only given. We have recently produced a degenerate mixture of the two lowest hyperfine states of fermionic /sup 6/Li in a stable, single-beam CO/sub 2/ laser trap. The trap is loaded from a magneto-optical trap (MOT) at an initial temperature of 150 /spl mu/K. Degeneracy is obtained by forced evaporation, accomplished by continuously lowering the trap depth; the trap is then adiabatically recompressed to full depth. After 60 seconds of forced evaporation, more than 10/sup 5/ atoms remain at temperatures below half of the Fermi temperature. These results are consistent with scaling laws we have derived for the phase-space density as a function of trap depth. This degenerate system is predicted to exhibit a Feshbach resonance at 850 G.