Fiftyfold Improvement in the Number of Quantum Degenerate Fermionic Atoms

We have produced a quantum degenerate ${}^6\mathrm{L}\mathrm{i}$ Fermi gas with up to $7\times {10}^7$ atoms, an improvement by a factor of 50 over all previous experiments with degenerate Fermi gases. This was achieved by sympathetic cooling with bosonic ${}^{23}\mathrm{N}\mathrm{a}$ in the $F=2$, upper hyperfine ground state. We have also achieved Bose-Einstein condensation of $F=2$ sodium atoms by direct evaporation.