Related Experiment Video
Updated: Mar 12, 2026

Cooling an Optically Trapped Ultracold Fermi Gas by Periodical Driving
Published on: March 30, 2017
Very Cold Indeed: The Nanokelvin Physics of Bose-Einstein Condensation
1JILA, National Institute of Standards and Technology and University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309.
Abstract:
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.
Related Concept Videos
Atomic Nuclei: Nuclear Spin State Population Distribution
The de Broglie Wavelength
The Bohr Model
Kinetic Theory of an Ideal Gas
The number of molecules in one mole is called...
Phase Transitions: Melting and Freezing
The Uncertainty Principle

