  We report on cooling of an atomic cesium gas closely above an
evanescent-wave. 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. In a series of measurements of heating and spin
depolarization an incoherent background of resonant photons in the
evanescent-wave diode laser light was found to be the limiting factor at this
stage.
