Illustration of the German physicist Wolfgang Ketterle (born 1957). Ketterle obtained his doctorate from the University of Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, West Germany, in 1986. In 1995, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, his team created a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), a state of matter that exists at temperatures very close to absolute zero, from sodium atoms. In the same year Carl Wieman and Eric Cornell created a BEC from rubidium atoms. Ketterle, Wieman and Cornell shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work.