The idea of an atom laser has been around for many years, and its principle is based on the more conventional optical laser. A normal laser emits light, but, unlike a normal lamp, the laser light is "coherent," so that it can focus to a pinpoint, and also travel a long distance without spreading out like a flashlight beam. By the time the optical laser was introduced in 1960, scientists were already familiar with the wavelike properties of matter, and the atom laser was under consideration as a theoretical possibility.
But It was not until 1997 that reports of the first rudimentary working model were released. A bizarre form of supercooled matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate made it all possible. This strange stuff, in which individual atoms "lose their identity" and coalesce into a single "blob," is in some ways like the photons of light in a laser. It was Professor Wolfgang Ketterle (b. 1957) and his colleagues who first managed to produce a Bose-Einstein condensate in 1995.
Not long afterward, in November 1996, Ketterle and his team cheered as their atom laser worked for the first time. They had successfully used a Bose- Einstein condensate as a source of coherent atoms to create a "matter wave." Described like a dripping faucet, it emitted pulses of droplets of atoms, each containing up to several million atoms.
Practical uses of the atom laser have yet to materialize, and it is confined to research at present. However, it is likely that atom lasers will be used in the future to directly deposit atoms onto computer chips, enabling the creation of much smaller, finer patterns and more powerful computers.
