Thermal equilibrium and efficient evaporation of an ultracold atom-molecule mixture

We derive the equilibrium conditions for a thermal atom-molecule mixture near a Feshbach resonance. Under the assumption of low collisional loss, thermodynamical properties are calculated and compared to the measurements of a recent experiment on thermal fermionic lithium atoms. We discuss and evaluate possible collision mechanisms which can lead to atom-molecule conversion. Finally, we propose a novel evaporative cooling scheme to efficiently cool the molecules toward Bose-Einstein condensation.