  We report on cooling of an atomic cesium gas closely above an evanescent-wave
atom mirror. At high densitities, optical cooling based on inelastic
reflections is found to be limited by a density-dependent excess temperature
and trap loss due to ultracold collisions involving repulsive molecular states.
Nevertheless, very good starting conditions for subsequent evaporative cooling
are obtained. Our first evaporation experiments show a temperature reduction
from 10muK down to 300nK along with a gain in phase-space density of almost two
orders of magnitude.
