The research also represents the first time a Bose-Einstein condensate has been created in a solid, rather than in a super-cooled gas.

The Bose-Einstein condensate is a super-cooled state of matter in which all the atoms have the same energy and quantum characteristics, similar to the way all photons in a laser share the same characteristics.

This new form of matter was first predicted mathematically by Indian physicist S.N. Bose and Albert Einstein in 1924.

Three American physicists — Eric Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle and Carl Wieman — first created a Bose-Einstein condensate in the lab in 1995 and shared the 2001 Nobel Prize for physics for their work.