Production of a highly degenerate Fermi gas of metastable helium-3 atoms

We report on the achievement of quantum degeneracy in both components of a Bose-Fermi mixture of metastable helium atoms, ${}^4$He* and ${}^3$He*. Degeneracy is achieved via Doppler cooling and forced evaporation for ${}^4$He*, and sympathetically cooling ${}^3$He* with ${}^4$He*. We discuss our simplified 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 $T\mathrm{/}{T}_F=0.14(1)$, consisting of $2.5\times {10}^4$ ${}^3$He* 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.