This Canadian first is the achievement of York Physics post-doctoral researcher Dr. Baolong Lu and Prof. William van Wijngaarden.

"Our ability to create a ‘super atom’ provides a significant new tool to examine fundamental physics," says van Wijngaarden. He adds that potential applications may eventually include the development of nano-circuits (extremely small circuits) for smaller and faster computer processors and the next generation of atomic clocks -- considered to be the world’s most accurate time pieces.

"We are extremely pleased by this achievement," said Prof. Gillian Wu, dean of York's Faculty of Pure and Applied Science. "Only a handful of top centres worldwide have successfully achieved a Bose-Einstein condensate, and now York is proudly among them. This is a remarkable achievement for York and for Canadian science."

This achievement represents the realisation of a theory that has intrigued scientists ever since it was proposed some 73 years ago by physicists Albert Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose. In a lab setting, atoms of gas will scatter throughout the container in which they are held and move at varying speeds from high to low. Expanding on Bose's work, Einstein showed that if a sample of atoms was cooled sufficiently, a large number of atoms would settle into the single lowest possible energy state in the container to form a single "super atom" or condensate.