Principal Investigator Wolfgang Ketterle
Co-investigator David Pritchard
Project Website http://cua.mit.edu/ketterle_group/
We use the atom trap to trap and cool sodium atoms to extremely low temperatures. By cooling the atoms to just 0.000001 degrees centigrade above absolute zero (-273 degrees C), we can study quantum mechanical effects which are completely obscured at higher temperatures. One special phenomenon that we study is called Bose-Einstein condensation.