Efficient all-optical production of large [superscript 6]Li quantum gases using D[subscript 1] gray-molasses cooling

Abstract

We use a gray molasses operating on the D[subscript 1] atomic transition to produce degenerate quantum gases of [superscript 6]Li with a large number of atoms. This sub-Doppler cooling phase allows us to lower the initial temperature of 10[superscript 9] atoms from 500 to 40 μK in 2 ms. We observe that D[subscript 1] cooling remains effective into a high-intensity infrared dipole trap where two-state mixtures are evaporated to reach the degenerate regime. We produce molecular Bose-Einstein condensates of up to 5 × 10[superscript 5] molecules and weakly interacting degenerate Fermi gases of 7×10[superscript 5] atoms at T/T[subscript F] < 0.1 with a typical experimental duty cycle of 11 s.