Almost absolute zero: the story of laser cooling and trapping

Summary form only given. Laser light can exert a force on atoms so as to slow and cool them; sufficiently cold atoms can be held in electromagnetic bottles. This talk, based on the Nobel Lecture given in Stockholm in December 1997, describes the experiments at NIST-Gaithersburg that demonstrated the deceleration of atomic beams, trapping atoms in magnetic traps, and the achievement of temperatures much lower than that has previously been thought possible-eventually reaching below one microkelvin.