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

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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 fermionic lithium experiment. 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.