Optical Trapping of a Two-Component Fermi Gas

Stable, strongly attractive, two-component mixtures of lithium fermions are confined and evaporatively cooled in an ultrastable optical trap. The optical trap has a lifetime of 370 seconds with a measured residual heating rate of 6 nK/sec, and is the first optical trap to achieve a background gas limited lifetime at 10^-11 Torr. After 60 seconds of evaporation, a final temperature corresponding to 2.2 T_F is obtained, where T_F is the Fermi temperature. We describe the physics of evaporation in time-dependent optical traps and our progress toward achieving degeneracy in a two-component mixture which is suitable for studies of superfluidity in a Fermi gas.