As a Nobel lecture, it has become a standard review paper which many people use as a general reference.

The greatest challenge was to master the experimental complexity—to get the big experiment to work.

  What are the implications of your work for the future of your field or neighboring fields?

Our work will probably have an impact on condensed matter physics and precision measurements. Using Bose-Einstein condensates will be a standard technique in the future.

  Can you name any particular mentor or colleague whose influence has had a profound effect on your work?

Most important was Prof. David Pritchard, who was my postdoctoral advisor at MIT and introduced me to the field of cold atom physics, acted as a mentor, and now again is a collaborator. I also owe a lot to those professors with whom I worked while in Germany—Wolfgang Götze at the Technical University in Munich, Herbert Walther at the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, and Jürgen Wolfrum at the University of Heidelberg.