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History

Bose first sent a paper to Einstein on the quantum statistics of light quanta (now called photons), in which he derived Planck's quantum radiation law without any reference to classical physics. Einstein was impressed, translated the paper himself from English to German and submitted it for Bose to the Zeitschrift für Physik, which published it in 1924. (The Einstein manuscript, once believed to be lost, was found in a library at Leiden University in 2005.) Einstein then extended Bose's ideas to matter in two other papers. The result of their efforts is the concept of a Bose gas, governed by Bose–Einstein statistics, which describes the statistical distribution of identical particles with integer spin, now called bosons. Bosons, particles that include the photon and atoms with an even number of neutrons (such as helium-4 (He)), are allowed to share a quantum state. Einstein proposed that cooling bosonic atoms to a very low temperature would cause them to fall (or "condense") into the lowest accessible quantum state, resulting in a new form of matter.

In 1938, Fritz London proposed the BEC as a mechanism for superfluidity in He and superconductivity.

The quest to produce a Bose–Einstein condensate in the laboratory was stimulated by a paper published in 1976 by two program directors at the National Science Foundation (William Stwalley and Lewis Nosanow). This led to the immediate pursuit of the idea by four independent research groups; these were led by Isaac Silvera (University of Amsterdam), Walter Hardy (University of British Columbia), Thomas Greytak (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and David Lee (Cornell University).

On 5 June 1995, the first gaseous condensate was produced by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman at the University of Colorado at Boulder NIST – JILA lab, in a gas of rubidium atoms cooled to 170 nanokelvins (nK). Shortly thereafter, Wolfgang Ketterle at MIT produced a Bose–Einstein Condensate in a gas of sodium atoms. For their achievements Cornell, Wieman, and Ketterle received the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics. These early studies founded the field of ultracold atoms, and hundreds of research groups around the world now routinely produce BECs of dilute atomic vapors in their labs.

Since 1995, many other atomic species have been condensed, and BECs have also been realized using molecules, quasi-particles, and photons.