Production of a highly degenerate Fermi gas of metastable 3He atoms

We report on the achievement of quantum degeneracy in both components of a Bose-Fermi mixture of metastable helium atoms, 4He* and 3He*. Degeneracy is achieved via Doppler cooling and forced evaporation for 4He*, and sympathetically cooling 3He* with 4He*. We discuss our modified implementation, along with the high versatility of our system. This technique is able to produce a degenerate Fermi gas with a minimum reduced temperature of T/TF = 0.14(1), consisting of 2.5 x 104 3He* atoms. Due to the high internal energy of both isotopes single atom detection is possible, opening the possibility of a large number of experiments into Bose-Fermi mixtures.