Five States of Matter

In my science curriculum, I teach students there are five states of matter. I find that most of them are familiar with four - solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. However, none are aware of a recent state of matter discovery - B.E.C., the Bose-Einstein condensate.

A Bose–Einstein condensate (B.E.C.) is a state of matter formed by particles cooled to temperatures very near to absolute zero(0 kelvin or -273.15 °C). Under such supercooled conditions, a large fraction of the atoms collapse into the lowest quantum state, at which point quantum effects become apparent on a macroscopic scale.

This state of matter was first predicted by Albert Einstein, building upon the work of Satyendra Bose in 1925, hence the name. Seventy years later, the first such condensate was produced by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman in 1995 at the University of Colorado at Boulder NIST-JILA lab, using a gas of rubidium atoms cooled to 170 nanokelvin (nK). Cornell, Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle at MIT were awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics in Stockholm, Sweden.