Nobel lecture: When atoms behave as waves: Bose-Einstein condensation and the atom laser

Abstract

The lure of lower temperatures has attracted physicists for the past century, and with each advance towards absolute zero, new and rich physics has emerged. Laypeople may wonder why ‘‘freezing cold’’ is not cold enough. But imagine how many aspects of nature we would miss if we lived on the surface of the sun. Without inventing refrigerators, we would only know gaseous matter and never observe liquids or solids, and miss the beauty of snowflakes. Cooling to normal earthly temperatures reveals these dramatically different states of matter, but this is only the beginning: many more states appear with further cooling. The approach into the kelvin range was rewarded with the discovery of superconductivity in 1911 and of superfluidity in helium-4 in 1938. Cooling into the millikelvin regime revealed the superfluidity of helium-3 in 1972. The advent of laser cooling in the 1980s opened up a new approach to ultralow-temperature physics. Microkelvin samples of dilute atom clouds were generated and used for precision measurements and studies of ultracold collisions. Nanokelvin temperatures were necessary to explore quantum-degenerate gases, such as Bose-Einstein condensates first realized in 1995. Each of these achievements in cooling has been a major advance, and recognized with a Nobel prize. This paper describes the discovery and study of BoseEinstein condensates (BEC’s) in atomic gases from my personal perspective. Since 1995, this field has grown explosively, drawing researchers from the communities of atomic physics, quantum optics, and condensedmatter physics. The trapped ultracold vapor has emerged as a new quantum system that is unique in the precision and flexibility with which it can be controlled and manipulated. At least 30 groups have now created condensates, and the publication rate on Bose-Einstein condensation has soared following the discovery of the gaseous condensates in 1995 (see Fig. 1).