Evaporative cooling of metastable helium in the multi-partial-wave regime

Metastable helium is buffer gas cooled, magnetically trapped, and evaporatively cooled in large numbers. 1011 4 He* atoms are trapped at an initial temperature of 400 mK and evaporatively cooled into the ultracold regime, resulting in a cloud of 2± 0.5 109 atoms at 1.4± 0.2 mK. Efficient evaporation indicates low collisional loss for 4 He* in both the ultracold and multi-partial-wave regime, in agreement with theory.Physic