1996/07/01 by Eric Cornell · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · Engineering · Computer Science · #Experimental and Theoretical Physics Studies #Experimental Learning in Engineering #Computational Physics and Python Applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.6028/jres.101.045
openalex publication_date 1996/07/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
As atoms get colder, they start to behave more like waves and less like particles. Cool a cloud of identical atoms so cold that the wave of each atom starts to overlap with the wave of its neighbor atom, and all of a sudden you wind up with a sort of quantum identity crisis known as Bose-Einstein condensation. How do we get something that cold? And what is the nature of the strange goop that results? These questions were addressed in a colloquium at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, on February 23, 1996. This paper is an edited transcript of that presentation.