Computer simulation showing tornado-like vortices forming within a spinning Bose-Einstein condensate. BEC's are a new state of matter in which a collection of atoms behaves like one uniform superatom. This NIST simulation helped confirm that BEC's are superfluids - a kind of liquid/gas that flows without friction. A Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is a state of matter of a dilute gas of bosons cooled to temperatures very close to absolute zero. Under such conditions, a large fraction of bosons occupy the lowest quantum state, at which point macroscopic quantum phenomena become apparent. This state was first predicted, generally, in 1924-25 by Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein.