26/03/2025
In 1924 Albert Einstein predicted a new state of matter, the Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC), on the basis of quantum formulations by the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose. Ever since, physicists tried to achieve this new fundamental state of matter. Seventy years passed before it finally happened on 5 June 1995.
Carl Wieman and Eric Cornell at the University of Colorado Boulder NIST-JILA lab proved the phenomenon when they produced the first gaseous condensate in a rarefied gas of rubidium atoms at an extremely low temperature. They received the Nobel Prize in 2001.
Wieman was born in 1951. Learn more about his life: https://bit.ly/49z2VXO
Image: 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.