ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the National Bureau of Standards’ (NBS) Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC) in a Dilute Atomic Vapor, relating the context in which the publication appeared, its impact on science, technology, and the general public, and brief details about the lives and work of the author. The first successful creation of dilute-gas BEC, announced in the NIST publication Observation of Bose-Einstein Condensation in a Dilute Atomic Vapor, was both a natural continuation of a 75-year tradition of NBS pre-eminence in spectroscopy and a striking confirmation that present-day NIST research is at the cutting edge of modern technology. The scientific motivation to create and study BEC in a gas stemmed from the long-held belief that the mechanism underlying BEC is the same mechanism responsible for the mysterious effects of superconductivity and superfluidity. Much of the standards and metrology work that NIST is charged with performing relies on precise spectroscopy of various internal resonances in atoms.
