Supervisor: Jan Arlt

Temperature has a minimum and for a long time, experimental physics has strived to approach this absolute zero in the hopes of discovering new physics.  
In this colloquium, I will take the audience on a journey towards colder and colder temperatures. At nano kelvin temperatures, we will enter the quantum realm where the bosons in a gas no longer behave as individual particles, and the strange phenomena of Bose-Einstein condensation takes over. Techniques that utilize lasers and magnetic fields to slow down atoms will be presented, and the limitations of these methods will become apparent.  
One limitation is the perturbation of gravity, and this has motivated recent experiments to be conducted in microgravity conditions. NASA placed their Cold Atom Lab in orbit in 2018 when they launched it to the International Space Station, and we will see how this Cold Atom Lab reliably creates Bose-Einstein condensates, making it the coldest spot in space.