in dilute atomic gases for the first time in 1995 , and is now the subject of intense theoretical and experimental study Bose - Einstein condensation

curvature coil IN 1924 the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose sent Einstein a paper in which he derived the Planck law for black-body radiation by treating the photons as a gas of identical particles. Einstein generalized Bose's theory to an ideal gas of identical atoms or molecules for which the number of particles is conserved and, in the same year, predicted that at sufficiently low temperatures the particles would become locked together in the lowest quantum state of the system. We now know that this phenomenon, called Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC), only happens for "bosons" particles with a total spin that is an integer multiple of % the Planck constant divided by 2n. This Bose condensate, and the process of condensation itself, was predicted to have many unusual properties and for years experimenters have tried to produce Bose-Einstein condensation in the laboratory. Finally in 1995 groups at JILA, a laboratory run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) obtained compelling evidence for Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute atomic gases. Both the Boulder and MIT groups, and a group at Rice University in Houston, Texas, have since improved the techniques for creating and observing this exotic quantum phenomenon, and rapid progress has been made in understanding its dynamic and thermodynamic properties. At MIT we have recently verified the intriguing feature that Bose-condensed atoms are "laser-like" in other words, that the matter waves of the atoms are coherent. In these experiments we have succeeded in observing coherence directly, and have demonstrated a rudimentary "atom laser" that generates a beam of coherent atoms, in analogy to emission of coherent photons by an optical laser. At the same time, theorists have clarified many fundamental issues and have developed powerful methods to simulate real systems. Order reigns in the ground state