What phenomenon earned Eric Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle and Carl Wieman the 2001 Physics Nobel Prize?

Bose–Einstein condensation earned Eric Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle and Carl Wieman the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics.

A Bose–Einstein condensate forms when a dilute gas of bosonic atoms is cooled to temperatures extremely close to absolute zero. Many atoms then occupy the same lowest-energy quantum state and behave collectively as a single coherent quantum system.

Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein predicted the phenomenon in the 1920s, but laboratory production waited for techniques that could cool and trap atoms with great precision. Cornell and Wieman created a condensate from rubidium atoms in 1995, while Ketterle produced and studied condensates using sodium. This is different from superconductivity, although both involve collective quantum behavior.