The fermionic condensate is a new phase of matter, first created on December 16, 2003 by physicist Deborah S. Jin. It is the sixth known phase of matter, and is related to the Bose-Einstein condensate, which was first created in 1995. The five other phases of matter are gases, solids, liquids, plasmas and Bose-Einstein condensates.

Bose-Einstein condensates are formed at low temperatures when a significant number of bosons collapse into the same quantum state. A similar condensate that uses fermions instead of bosons is known as a fermionic condensate. Such a condensate is far more difficult to achieve because the Pauli exclusion principle prohibits two or more fermions from occupying the same quantum state.

In 1957, John Bardeen, Leon Cooper and Robert Schrieffer proposed that electrons, a type of fermion, could pair-up to form what are now known as Cooper pairs - such pairs essentially act like bosons. If a similar sort of pairing were possible amongst fermionic atoms then the formation of a fermionic condensate might be possible. However until recently many believed that the temperature required for such a pairing would be too cold to achieve.

In 2001, physicist Murray Holland of the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) speculated that fermionic atoms could be coaxed into pairing up at higher temperatures by subjecting them to a magnetic field. In 2003, Deborah Jin of the same institute (JILA) and Rudolf Grimm of the University of Innsbruck were able to coax fermionic atoms into bonding to form molecular bosons and thus able to form a Bose-Einstein condensate but not a fermionic condensate.

On December 16 2003, Deborah Jin observed the pairing and formation of a fermionic condensate among fermionic atoms for the very first time. The experiment involved 500,000 Potassium-40 atoms cooled to a temperature of 5 × 10-8 kelvin with a time-varying magnetic field applied to them. The findings were published in the online edition of Physical Review Letters on January 24, 2004.