Bose–Einstein condensate

[Lisa Wolfe]

In the July 14, 1995 issue of Science magazine, researchers from JILA reported achieving a temperature far lower than had ever been produced before and creating an entirely new state of matter predicted decades ago by Albert Einstein and Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose. Cooling rubidium atoms to less than 170 billionths of a degree above absolute zero caused the individual atoms to condense into a "superatom" behaving as a single entity. The graphic shows three-dimensional successive snap shots in time in which the atoms condensed from less dense red, yellow and green areas into very dense blue to white areas. JILA is jointly operated by NIST and the University of Colorado at Boulder.