Carl Weiman won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001 with Eric A. Cornell and Wolfgang Ketterle… Carl Weiman won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001 with Eric A. Cornell and Wolfgang Ketterle for their discovery of a new state of matter – the Bose-Einstein condensate.

The researchers discovered this new form of matter while attempting to make atoms move in the same way as a laser beam.

The particles of laser beams move in a different way from normal light, with all the atoms all having the same energy and oscillating together.

The researchers managed to make the element rubidium act in the way a laser beam does by reducing its temperature to 20 nanoKelvin, which is 0.00000002 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero.

This new method of controlling matter is useful in precision measurement and nanotechnology.