Satyendra Nath Bose developed statistical methods, later utilized by Albert Einstein, to describe the behavior of massless photons and massive atoms, as well as other bosons. This "Bose-Einstein statistics" described the behavior of a "Bose gas" composed of uniform particles of integer spin (i.e. bosons). When cooled to extremely low temperatures, Bose-Einstein statistics predicts that the particles in a Bose gas will collapse into their lowest accessible quantum state, creating a new form of matter, which is called a superfluid. This is a specific form of condensation which has special properties.
Bose-Einstein condensates were a purely theoretical conjecture until experimentally observed by Eric Cornell & Carl Wieman at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1995, for which they received the 2001 Nobel prize.
