She and fellow U.C.B. physicist Jun Ye recently succeeded in making a gas of ultracold polar molecules of potassium and rubidium near the temperature of the quantum regime where Jin previously observed a fermionic condensate.
To trap individual neutral atoms, the researchers first used a laser to cool a cloud of rubidium atoms to ultracold, near - absolute - zero temperatures, slowing the atoms down from their usual, high - speed trajectories.