"In brief, the conditions for BEC in alkali gases are reached by combining two cooling methods. Laser cooling is used to precool the gas. The principle of laser cooling is that scattered photons are on average blue-shifted with respect to the incident laser beam. As a result, the scattered light carries away more energy than has been absorbed by the atoms, resulting in net cooling. Blue-shifts are caused by Doppler shifts or ac Stark shifts. The different laser cooling schemes are described in the 1997 Nobel lectures in physics ... After the precooling, the atoms are cold enough to be confined in a magnetic trap. Wall-free confinement is necessary, otherwise the atoms would stick to the surface of the container. It is noteworthy that similar magnetic confinement is also used for plasmas which are too hot for any material container. After magnetically trapping the atoms, forced evaporative cooling is applied as the second cooling stage ... In this scheme, the trap depth is reduced, allowing the most energetic atoms to escape while the remainder rethermalize at steadily lower temperatures. Most BEC experiments reach quantum degeneracy between 500 nK and 2 μK, at densities between 1014 and 1015 cm-3. The largest condensates are of 100 million atoms for sodium, and a billion for hydrogen; the smallest are just a few hundred atoms."