BEC: THE FIRST TEN YEARS

Bose-Einstein condensation was first created in a gas on June 5, 1995, thus it was almost exactly ten years old at the date of this conference. In fact, the first public appearance of BEC was made at the ICOLS meeting ten years ago when Eric Cornell presented our results. In this review, I will try to give a brief overview of what has been happening these last ten years. I will concentrate on a discussion of the experiments, but one reason for the rapid excitement and growth in BEC has been the close coupling between experiment and theory. A big reason for this coupling is because the interactions in the BEC have a uniquely simple form for a many body quantum system, and hence, are very tractable theoretically. The implications of this are that the comparison of theory and experiment provides a very rigorous test of theoretical ideas, and the theory has good predictive capabilities that can guide experiments in interesting new directions. This paper will be divided into two sections. The first will provide a very brief historical background on BEC and how we got there, and the second part will look at some examples of the most notable physics that has been done with BECs in the past ten years.