Very Cold Indeed: The Nanokelvin Physics of Bose-Einstein Condensation

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.