Optically Trapped Fermi Gases

Physicist had predicted the existence of degenerate Fermi gases long ago in the 1930s, but nobody had produced a fully independent one in the lab until five years ago. The closest model was the cloud of electrons inside an ordinary metal copper where electrons behave very much like a gas even though the metal is solid. Electrons are free to roam around that makes the metal conduct electricity, and thus showing the same behavior as the degenerate Fermi gases. Here, Thomas et al expound the quantum behavior of the degenerate Fermi gas and Bose-Einstein condensates through optic cooling.