Production of Degenerate Fermi Gases of $^6$Li Atoms in an Optical Dipole Trap
Xiang-Chuan Yan1,3, Da-Li Sun1*, Lu Wang1,3, Jing Min1,3, Shi-Guo Peng1, and Kai-Jun Jiang1,2*
1State Key Laboratory of Magnetic Resonance and Atomic and Molecular Physics, Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, Innovation Academy for Precision Measurement Science and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430071, China 2Center for Cold Atom Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430071, China 3University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
Abstract：We report the experimental production of degenerate Fermi gases of $^6$Li atoms in an optical dipole trap. The gray-molasses technique is carried out to decrease the atomic temperature to 57 µK, which facilitates the efficient loading of cold atoms into the optical dipole trap. The Fermi degeneracy is achieved by evaporative cooling of a two-spin mixture of $^6$Li atoms on the Feshbach resonance. The degenerate atom number per spin is $3.5\times10^4$, and the reduced temperature $T/T_{\rm F}$ is as low as 0.1, where $T_{\rm F}$ is the Fermi temperature of the non-interacting Fermi gas. We also observe the anisotropic expansion of the atom cloud in the strongly interacting regime.
2021, Vol. 38 
