  We demonstrate experimentally the evaporative cooling of a few hundred
rubidium 87 atoms in a single-beam microscopic dipole trap. Starting from 800
atoms at a temperature of 125microKelvins, we produce an unpolarized sample of
40 atoms at 110nK, within 3s. The phase-space density at the end of the
evaporation reaches unity, close to quantum degeneracy. The gain in phase-space
density after evaporation is 10^3. We find that the scaling laws used for much
larger numbers of atoms are still valid despite the small number of atoms
involved in the evaporative cooling process. We also compare our results to a
simple kinetic model describing the evaporation process and find good agreement
with the data.
