The first Bose–Einstein condensate created in a laboratory was produced in 1995. On 5 June that year, Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman, and their colleagues at the JILA laboratory cooled a dilute gas of rubidium-87 atoms to below 170 nanokelvins, creating the first pure gaseous condensate.
A Bose–Einstein condensate forms when bosons are cooled extremely close to absolute zero. At that point, a large fraction of the atoms occupy the same lowest-energy quantum state, allowing quantum behavior normally associated with individual particles to appear on a visible, macroscopic scale.
The phenomenon was predicted decades earlier. Satyendra Nath Bose developed the relevant quantum statistics in 1924, and Albert Einstein extended the idea to matter in 1924–1925. The laboratory achievement came only after advances in laser cooling and magnetic evaporative cooling made ultracold atomic gases practical.
Wolfgang Ketterle independently created a sodium condensate at MIT later in 1995. Cornell, Wieman, and Ketterle shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for this achievement. A common mix-up is confusing the 1995 laboratory creation with the earlier theoretical prediction.