When Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman produced a Bose–Einstein condensate from rubidium atoms in 1995, there naturally arose the prospect of creating a similar sort of condensate made from fermionic atoms, which would form a superfluid by the BCS mechanism. However, early calculations indicated that the temperature required for producing Cooper pairing in atoms would be too cold to achieve. In 2001, Murray Holland at JILA suggested a way of bypassing this difficulty. He speculated that fermionic atoms could be coaxed into pairing up by subjecting them to a strong magnetic field.
In 2003, working on Holland's suggestion, Deborah Jin at JILA, Rudolf Grimm at the University of Innsbruck, and Wolfgang Ketterle at MIT managed  to coax fermionic atoms into forming molecular bosons, which then underwent Bose–Einstein condensation. However, this was not a true fermionic condensate. On December 16, 2003, Jin managed to produce a condensate out of fermionic atoms for the first time. The experiment involved 500,000 potassium-40 atoms cooled to a temperature of 5×10 K, subjected to a time-varying magnetic field.