Astronomy and physics dominate Science top ten
Confirmation that the universe is flat – expanding at just the right rate not to collapse – came from measurements of ripples in the cosmic background radiation left over from the big bang...
Electrons trapped by laser beam
The experiment was carried out inside a vacuum chamber filled with a low density nitrogen or argon gas. A wave plate – in the form of a small circular piece of material – was inserted into...
Fermions go degenerate
Brian DeMarco and Deborah Jin used a pair of magneto-optical traps to confine about 700000 atoms of potassium-40 at temperatures below 300 nanokelvin. This is about half of the degeneracy temperature ...
Trapping breakthrough for molecules
Many of the optical and magnetic techniques used to trap and cool atoms do not work with molecules because they have complex internal energy levels. Instead Doyle and his colleagues chilled the molecu...
Laser-cooled Nobel prize
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Steve Chu, and Bill Phillips have won the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physics
Read article: Bose-Einstein condensation
Bose-Einstein condensation
Predicted in 1924 and first observed in 1995, the fifth state of matter is now under intense scrutiny
