This book is an introductory text to the physics of Bose-Einstein condensation. This phenomenon, first predicted by Einstein in 1925 has been realized experimentally in 1995 in a remarkable series of experiments whose importance has been recognized by the award of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics. The condensate is actually a new state of matter, where quantum-mechanical wave functions of atoms behave as coherent matter waves in the same way as coherent light waves in the case of a laser. The authors provide a theoretical presentation of the main concepts underlying the physics of dilute...

This book is devoted to BEC as an interdisciplinary subject, covering atomic and molecular physics, laser physics, low temperatures, and astrophysics, and it will serve as an in-depth report on recent progress and will suggest promising research topics for graduate students and researchers in physics.