Researchers at Universität Innsbruck in Austria have created the first Bose-Einstein condensate of cesium using optical cooling and trapping techniques. They reported their achievement in the Dec. 5 issue of Sciencexpress.To produce the condensate, they employed two crossed 100-W beams of 10.6-µm CO2 laser radiation as an optical trap, into which they loaded approximately 20 million 133Cs atoms from a standard magneto-optical trap. After an initial cooling step, they created a dimple in the potential well of the trap with a 1064-nm ytterbium-doped fiber laser. By turning off one of the CO2 laser beams and applying evaporative cooling by ramping down the power of the fiber laser, they produced nearly pure condensates of 16,000 atoms.