Production of Degenerate Fermi Gases of 6Li Atoms in an Optical Dipole TrapSupported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2016YFA0301503), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11674358, 11434015, and 11974384), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. YJKYYQ20170025), and K. C. Wong Education Foundation (Grant No. GJTD-2019-15).

Abstract

We report the experimental production of degenerate Fermi gases of 6Li atoms in an optical dipole trap. The gray-molasses technique is carried out to decrease the atomic temperature to 57 μK, which facilitates the efficient loading of cold atoms into the optical dipole trap. The Fermi degeneracy is achieved by evaporative cooling of a two-spin mixture of 6Li atoms on the Feshbach resonance. The degenerate atom number per spin is 3.5 × 104, and the reduced temperature T/T F is as low as 0.1, where T F is the Fermi temperature of the non-interacting Fermi gas. We also observe the anisotropic expansion of the atom cloud in the strongly interacting regime.