Preparation of a Degenerate, Two-Component Fermi Gas by Evaporation in a Single Beam Optical Trap

We achieve degeneracy in a mixture of the two lowest hyperfine states of $^6$Li by direct evaporation in a CO$_2$ laser trap. More than $10^5$ atoms are confined at temperatures below $4 \mu$K at full trap depth, where the Fermi temperature for each state is $8 \mu$K. Since the trapped mixture is predicted to have a Feshbach resonance, this system is well suited for future studies of pairing interactions mediated by s-wave scattering.