https://phys.org/news/2019-01-ultracold-simulators-super-dense-stars.html

"We don't know the practical payoff yet, but every time physicists have laser cooled a new kind of thing, it has opened a whole world of possibilities," said lead scientist Tom Killian, professor of physics and astronomy at Rice. "Nobody predicted that laser cooling atoms and ions would lead to the world's most accurate clocks or breakthroughs in quantum computing. We do this because it's a frontier."

Killian and graduate students Tom Langin and Grant Gorman used 10 lasers of varying wavelengths to create and cool the neutral plasma. They started by vaporizing strontium metal and using one set of intersecting laser beams to trap and cool a puff of strontium atoms about the size of a child's fingertip. Next, they ionized the ultracold gas with a 10-nanosecond blast from a pulsed laser. By stripping one electron from each atom, the pulse converted the gas to a plasma of ions and electrons.