Preparing a highly degenerate Fermi gas in an optical lattice

Abstract

We propose a method to prepare fermionic atoms in a three-dimensional optical lattice at unprecedentedly low temperatures and uniform filling factors. The process involves adiabatic loading of degenerate atoms into multiple energy bands of an optical lattice followed by a filtering stage whereby atoms from all but the lowest band are removed. Of critical importance is the use of a nonharmonic trapping potential to provide external confinement for the atoms. For realistic experimental parameters, this procedure will produce a Fermi gas in a lattice with a reduced temperature $T/{T}_{F}~0.003$ and an entropy per particle of $s~0.02 {k}_{B}$.