Adiabatic compression of a trapped Fermi gas

We propose a method to reach conditions of high degeneracy in a trapped Fermi gas, based on the adiabatic transfer of a small fraction of atoms from a magnetic to a tighter optical trap. The transformation yields a large increase of the Fermi energy, without a significant change of the temperature. The large enhancement of the central density emphasizes the role of the interactions and makes the system much closer to the BCS transition. We show that, despite Pauli blocking, the thermalization processes ensuring equilibrium in the optical trap are not suppressed at low temperature.