Bose–Einstein condensation in the blink of an eye

It’s been more than two decades since Carl Wieman and Eric Cornell created the first Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC), confirming the counterintuitive prediction that a macroscopic population of atoms can pile into a single quantum ground state if cooled below some critical temperature. In all those years, the recipe for creating the condensates has hardly changed: Laser Doppler cooling chills the cloud of atoms as close to the critical temperature as possible; when that technique can go no further, evaporative cooling does the rest. But the evaporative cooling step is inefficient. It works by jettisoning most of a cloud’s atoms in order to cool the remaining few—a relatively slow process that can take a minute or more. Now MIT researchers led by Vladan Vuletić have come up with an alternative approach that allows them to create BECs in a fraction of the time.