Quantum Frontiers
Bose–Einstein Condensate
What’s going on
At room temperature, atoms dash about like a crowd at a fair. Chill a cloud of certain atoms to less than a millionth of a degree above absolute zero and their quantum waves spread so wide they overlap. They drop into the same state and behave as one “super-atom”, big enough to photograph. Predicted in 1924–25, it was first made in a lab in 1995.
Myth
A Bose–Einstein condensate is just an extremely cold gas.
Fact
It is a state of matter in which thousands of atoms share one quantum state.
Learn more
Nobel Prize in Physics 2001 (Cornell, Ketterle, Wieman), nobelprize.org.
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