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Abstract

This thesis reports on the progress towards the preparation of an ultracold three component Fermi gas of ⁶Li in a two-dimensional optical lattice. An optical dipole trap was set up and filled with ultracold atoms from a magnetooptical trap, which were then evaporatively cooled. In a trap with an average trap frequency of 146Hz at an aspect ratio of 1:9:42 a degenerate, non-interacting Fermi gas of 150 000 atoms was created with a lifetime of 42 s. In the same trap a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate of approximately 25 000 ⁶Li₂dimers was achieved. Radio frequency pulses were applied to a two-component thermal gas to populate the third component and determine the maximum achievable Rabi frequency with this setup. In the next step we want to transfer the evaporatively cooled cloud from the dipole trap into a two-dimensional potential. As this will be created by an interference pattern of two intersecting laser beams, tests were performed concerning the short- and long-term stability of the optical setup. On the basis of these measurements a compact and stable interferometer casing was designed and will be integrated into the experiment very soon.