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. 10(11) He-4(*) atoms are trapped at an initial temperature of 400 mK and evaporatively cooled into the ultracold regime, resulting in a cloud of 2 +/- 0.5x10(9) atoms at 1.4 +/- 0.2 mK. Efficient evaporation indicates low collisional loss for He-4(*) in both the ultracold and multi-partial-wave regime, in agreement with theory.