  We report on the creation of a degenerate dipolar Fermi gas of erbium atoms.
We force evaporative cooling in a fully spin-polarized sample down to
temperatures as low as 0.2 times the Fermi temperature. The strong magnetic
dipole-dipole interaction enables elastic collisions between identical fermions
even in the zero-energy limit. The measured elastic scattering cross section
agrees well with the predictions from dipolar scattering theory, which follow a
universal scaling law depending only on the dipole moment and on the atomic
mass. Our approach to quantum degeneracy proceeds with very high cooling
efficiency and provides large atomic densities, and it may be extended to
various dipolar systems.
