Physics World
Condensates on crest of a wave
Murray Holland
Abstract
One of the remarkable things about low-temperature physics is that it offers a place where the hidden world of quantum mechanics can be revealed, often giving rise to spectacular effects. In 1995 the Nobel-prize-winning observation of Bose–Einstein condensation showed that a dilute gas of atoms cooled to sufficiently low temperatures could "condense" into an intriguing state in which all the atoms can be described by the same quantum wavefunction.