In breaking this record, Eric Cornell and his colleagues in Boulder cooled rubidium atoms to 5
microkelvin by optical molasses, and then turned off the lasers while keeping the atoms trapped in a magnetic field.
The strontium atoms in each standard are isolated from the environment and from one another: cooled to a temperature below 10
microkelvins, they are situated inside an ultrahigh vacuum chamber and immobilized in a specially constructed optical trap generated
by the beam of a supplementary laser.