Preparing a highly degenerate Fermi gas in an optical lattice

We propose a method to prepare a sample of fermionic atoms in a three-dimensional (3D) optical lattice at unprecedentedly low temperatures and uniform filling factors. The process involves adiabatic loading of atoms into multiple energy bands of an optical lattice followed by a filtering stage whereby atoms from all but the ground band are removed. Of critical importance is the use of a non-harmonic trapping potential, taken here to be the radial profile of a high-order Laguerre-Gaussian laser beam, to provide external confinement for the atoms. For realistic experimental parameters, this procedure should produce samples with temperatures $\sim10^{-3}$ of the Fermi temperature. This would allow the investigation of the low-temperature phase diagram of the Fermi-Hubbard model as well as the initialization of a high-fidelity quantum register.