At ColdQuanta we trace our roots all the way back to a collaboration between two brilliant minds: Albert Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose. In 1924, Bose sent a letter to Einstein and respectfully asked for his help. This sparked their uncovering of the fifth form of matter, named the Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC).
When atoms are cooled to a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero, they are forced to begin to clump together and condense into the lowest accessible quantum state, and transition from a gas into a BEC. However, this was just speculation, as the technology needed to create BEC wouldn’t exist for another sixty years.
In 1995, Dr. Eric Cornell and Dr. Carl Wieman created the first-ever BEC in Boulder, Colorado. This fifth form of matter was created at JILA—a collaboration between CU Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Drs. Cornell and Wieman won the Nobel Prize in 2001.
Dr. Dana Anderson was colleagues with Drs. Cornell and Wieman at the University of Boulder. Drs. Anderson and Dr. Cornell collaborated on the use of cold atoms to make practical things. In 2007, Dr. Anderson co-founded ColdQuanta and became its CTO. Dr. Mark Saffman was one of Dana’s students and, after moving to the University of Wisconsin, joined ColdQuanta as its Chief Scientist with a focus on the Cold Atom Quantum Computer. Many of CQ’s scientists and engineers were students and colleagues of Drs. Anderson and Saffman.