A Large Atom Number Metastable Helium Bose-Einstein Condensate
  We have produced a Bose-Einstein condensate of metastable helium (4He*) containing over 1.5x10^7 atoms, which is a factor of 25 higher than previously achieved. The improved starting conditions for evaporative cooling are obtained by applying one-dimensional Doppler cooling inside a magnetic trap. The same technique is successfully used to cool the spin-polarized fermionic isotope (3He*), for which thermalizing collisions are highly suppressed. Our detection techniques include absorption imaging, time-of-flight measurements on a microchannel plate detector and ion counting to monitor the formation and decay of the condensate. 
A.S. Tychkov, T. Jeltes, J.M. McNamara, P.J.J. Tol, N. Herschbach, W.   Hogervorst, and W. Vassen