Illustration of the US physicist Eric Cornell (born 1961). Cornell obtained his doctorate in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1990. He then worked with Carl Wieman at the University of Colorado Boulder, combining lasers and magnetic traps to cool matter very close to absolute zero. The research group succeeded in creating a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), a state of matter predicted to exist at these low temperatures. In the same year Wolfgang Ketterle created a BEC from sodium atoms. Wieman, Cornell and Wolfgang Ketterle shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work.