[Historical report created from ArXiv.org submission:]

"We achieve degeneracy in a mixture of the two lowest hyperfine states of ⁶Li by direct evaporation in a CO₂ laser trap, yielding the first all-optically produced degenerate Fermi gas. More than 10⁵ atoms are confined at temperatures below 4 µK at full trap depth, where the Fermi temperature for each state is 8 µK. This degenerate two-component mixture is ideal for exploring mechanisms of superconductivity ranging from Cooper pairing to Bose condensation of strongly bound pairs."

Published in Physical Review Letters

Updated: 25 Jul 2005

[Received 19 November 2001; published 8 March 2002:] Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 120405 (2002)