Bose-Einstein condensed atomic gases are a new class of quantum fluids.They are
produced by cooling a dilute atomic gas to nanokelvin temperatures using laser
and evaporative cooling techniques.The study of these quantum gases has become
an interdisciplinary field of atomic and condensed matter physics.Topics of many-body
physics can now be studied with the methods of atomic physics.Many long-standing
predictions of the theory of the weakly interacting Bose gas have been verified,including
thermodynamic properties of the phase transition and dynamic properties such as
shape oscillations and sound propagation.Stimulated light scattering was used
to determine the dynamic structure factor both in the phonon and free-particle
regime. Atomic Bose condensates show a variety of novel phenomena which include
multi-component spinor condensates, magnetic domain formation, miscibility and
immiscibility of quantum fluids, and finite-size effects.