Paper detail

Accelerating evaporative cooling of a strongly interacting Fermi gas by tilting the optical trap with a magnetic field gradient

We present a rapid evaporative cooling scheme for a strongly interacting $^{6}\mathrm{Li}$ Fermi gas in an optical dipole trap. The method uses a magnetic-field-gradient--induced tilt of the trapping potential to accelerate cooling in the unitarity-limited regime. In evaporation based only on lowering the optical trap depth, the unitarity-limited scattering cross section can support runaway cooling; however, the cooling rate slows around $T/T_F \simeq 0.5$, and the runaway behavior is no longer maintained. We improve on this approach by applying a magnetic-field gradient when the gas temperature reaches about half the Fermi temperature. The induced tilt opens an escape channel for energetic atoms while keeping the trap frequencies nearly unchanged. This modification increases the cooling speed and cools the gas below the superfluid transition temperature, reaching $T/T_F = 0.16$ on a timescale of $\sim 25\,\mathrm{ms}$. Our results provide a simple and robust route for rapidly cooling a strongly interacting Fermi gas into the superfluid regime, facilitating studies of the physics of unitary Fermi superfluids.