All-Optical Production of a Degenerate Fermi Gas

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