Progress toward a degenerate Fermi gas of lithium

Summary form only given. We describe steps towards the production of a Fermi degenerate of atomic lithium. The experimental approach is to perform sympathetic cooling of /sup 6/Li via elastic collisions with evaporatively cooled /sup 7/Li. In a strongly confining Ioffe-Pritchard trap, evaporative cooling of 7Li to the quantum degenerate regime has been performed. The implication for the achievement of the /sup 6/Li Fermi degeneracy is discussed.