Bose-Einstein condensate

Hypothesis put forward in 1924 by German-born US physicist Albert Einstein and Indian physicist Satyendra Bose, suggesting that when a dense gas is cooled to a little over absolute zero it will condense and its atoms will lose their individuality and act as an organized whole. The first Bose-Einstein condensate was produced in June 1995 by US physicists cooling rubidium atoms to 10 billionths of a degree above absolute zero. The condensate existed for about a minute before becoming rubidium ice.

In 2003 scientists formed a new state of matter: a Bose-Einstein condensate made out of molecules – previously all BECs were composed of atoms. A gaseous cloud of lithium atoms was cooled, with the use of laser beams, until weak chemical bonds between atoms produced paired sets of lithium atoms. These paired atoms were then stable enough to form a BEC consisting of 150,000 molecules that lasted for 20 seconds.