In condensed matter physics, an ultracold atom is an atom with a temperature near absolute zero. At such temperatures, an atom's quantum-mechanical properties become important.
To reach such low temperatures, a combination of several techniques typically has to be used. First, atoms are trapped and pre-cooled via laser cooling in a magneto-optical trap. To reach the lowest possible temperature, further cooling is performed using evaporative cooling in a magnetic or optical trap. Several Nobel prizes in physics are related to the development of the techniques to manipulate quantum properties of individual atoms (e.g. 1989, 1996, 1997, 2001, 2005, 2012, 2018).
Experiments with ultracold atoms study a variety of phenomena, including quantum phase transitions, Bose–Einstein condensation (BEC), bosonic superfluidity, quantum magnetism, many-body spin dynamics, Efimov states, Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer (BCS) superfluidity and the BEC–BCS crossover. Some of these research directions utilize ultracold atom systems as quantum simulators to study the physics of other systems, including the unitary Fermi gas and the Ising and Hubbard models. Ultracold atoms could also be used for realization of quantum computers.