Bose-Einstein Condensation of Rapidly Rotating Atoms (Invited Talk)

Dilute gaseous Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs), predicted in 1924 by Albert Einstein, were first realized experimentally some 70 years later, resulting in the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery and for fundamental studies of their properties. The ability to manipulate and control BEC systems make them remarkable arenas for realizing nearly ideal highly tunable many-body systems. Rapidly rotating BECs form large arrays of vortices, whose static and dynamic properties have been studied experimentally and theoretically. This talk will discuss some of the interesting properties of BECs when the rotation rate is so rapid that the physics of the quantum Hall effect becomes relevant, a regime that has recently been reached in experiments.