Collisional Stability of a Three-Component Degenerate Fermi Gas

We report on the creation of a degenerate Fermi gas consisting of a balanced mixture of atoms in three different hyperfine states of ⁶Li. This new system consists of three distinguishable fermions with different and tunable interparticle scattering lengths a₁₂, a₁₃, and a₂₃. We are able to prepare samples containing 5×10⁴ atoms in each state at a temperature of about 215 nK, which corresponds to T/T_F≈0.37. We investigated the collisional stability of the gas for magnetic fields between 0 and 600 G and found a prominent loss feature at 130 G. From lifetime measurements, we determined three-body loss coefficients, which vary over nearly 3 orders of magnitude.