Scaling laws for evaporative cooling in time-dependent optical traps

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We derive scaling laws for the number of atoms, collision rate, and phase-space density as a function of trap depth for evaporative cooling in an adiabadically lowered optical trap. The results are in excellent agreement with a Boltzmann equation model and show that very large increases in phase-space density can be obtained without excessive slowing of the evaporation rate. Predictions are in reasonable agreement with a recent experiment that achieves Bose-Einstein condensation by evaporation in an optical trap. We also discuss evaporation of fermionic mixtures and explain why Pauli blocking does not strongly inhibit cooling.