  We achieve a highly degenerate and strongly interacting Fermi gas in a
mixture of the two lowest hyperfine states of $^6$Li by direct evaporative
cooling in a high power crossed optical dipole trap. The trap is loaded from a
large atom number magneto-optical trap (MOT) which is realized by a laser
system of 2.5-watts intracavity-frequency-doubled light output at 671 nm. With
this system, we also demonstrate the production of a molecular Bose-Einstein
condensates (mBEC), and observe the anisotropic expansion of Fermi gases in the
so-called BEC-BCS crossover regime.
