All-Optical Production of a Degenerate Fermi Gas

We achieve degeneracy in a mixture of the two lowest hyperfine states of ${}^6\mathrm{Li}$ by direct evaporation in a ${\mathrm{CO}}_2$ laser trap, yielding the first all optically produced degenerate Fermi gas. More than ${10}^5$ atoms are confined at temperatures below $4\mu \mathrm{K}$ at full trap depth, where the Fermi temperature for each state is $8\mu \mathrm{K}$. This degenerate two-component mixture is ideal for exploring mechanisms of superconductivity ranging from Cooper pairing to Bose-Einstein condensation of strongly bound pairs.