The Doppler cooling limit for electric dipole transitions is typically in the hundreds of microkelvins. In the 1980s this limit was seen as the lowest achievable temperature. It was a surprise then when sodium atoms were cooled to 43 microkelvin when their Doppler cooling limit is 240 microkelvin, the new low was explained by the addition of more atomic states in combination to laser polarization. Previous conceptions of laser cooling were decided to have been too simplistic. The major laser cooling breakthroughs in the 70s and 80s led to several improvements to preexisting technology and new discoveries with temperatures just above absolute zero. The cooling processes were utilized to make atomic clocks more accurate and to improve spectroscopic measurements, and led to the observation of a new state of matter at ultracold temperatures. The new state of matter, the Bose–Einstein condensate, was observed in 1995 by Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman, and Wolfgang Ketterle.
Laser cooling was primarily used to create ultracold atoms. For example, the experiments in quantum physics need to perform near absolute zero where unique quantum effects such as Bose–Einstein condensation can be observed.  Laser cooling is also a primary tool in optical clock experiments.