BOSE EINSTEIN CONDENSATION OF HYDROGEN ATOMS has been achieved by Daniel Kleppner and Tom Greytak (greytak@mit.edu) and their colleagues at MIT. Unlike conventional condensates of atoms, a Bose Einstein condensate (BEC) is essentially an amalgamation of many atoms (which have been chilled to nearly absolute zero temperatures) into a single quantum state. In the past few years researchers had reached the BEC state with alkali atoms but not yet with the simplest of elements, hydrogen, partly because the energy levels within the H atom are more widely spaced (the transitions corresponding to ultraviolet light, for which no suitable laser source is available) making it harder to manipulate and probe the sample with lasers. But with a modified evaporative cooling technique, in which the hotter atoms are ejected from their atom trap (as with alkali atoms) by blasts of radio waves, and by probing the hydrogen atoms with two photons at once, the BEC state was observed at last. The MIT researchers are presently gathering more data before submitting papers to a journal, but their preliminary results (reported indirectly last week at the Conference on Precision Measurement in Washington, DC) are as follows: the transition to BEC occurred at a temperature of about 40 micro-kelvins and the number of atoms involved was about 100 million, 10 times more than in any previous condensate. The difficult (but high-precision) form of spectroscopy used to probe the H atoms (involving two photons simultaneously) has the virtue of (1) causing a narrow beam of atoms to be ejected from the condensate (useful for any future atom laser) and (2) permitting the study of some condensate properties not yet examined in the alkali work. (See figure at Physics News Graphics)