Three physicists who made atoms "sing" won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics today for freezing matter into a new state that may help make microscopic computers and revolutionise aircraft guidance.
Mr Eric Cornell and Mr Carl Wieman of the United States and Germany's Mr Wolfgang Ketterle won the $1 million prize for creating a form of matter that is extremely pure and coherent - in the same way that lasers are a pure kind of light.
This year's Nobel laureates have caused atoms to "sing in unison" - thus discovering a new state of matter, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.
Their technology can create atom lasers that could draw microscopic computer circuits many times tinier than the smallest in use today. This would allow very fast, powerful and compact computers to be built.
Atom lasers could also allow extremely accurate guidance systems and gravity meters, pinpointing the position of airliners and spacecraft to within a few centimetres.
Mr Cornell, a particularly young Nobel laureate at just 39, works at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado. Mr Ketterle (43) works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Mr Wieman (50) at the University of Colorado.