Evaporative cooling was used in experimental efforts to reach lower temperatures in an effort to discover a new state of matter predicted by Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein known as a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC). In evaporative cooling, the hottest atoms in a sample are allowed to escape which reduces the average temperature of the sample. The Nobel Prize in 2001 was awarded to Eric A. Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle and Carl E. Wieman for the achievement of Bose–Einstein condensate in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates.