The field of cold and confined atomic gases has been growing very rapidly, especially during the last fifteen years, after the first experimental realization of a Bose-Einstein condensate in dilute vapors of alkali-metal atoms.
In this talk I will first give a brief introduction to this field.
Then, in the second part of my talk, I will focus on some novel superfluid properties of this system, which result from various reasons. These include the presence and the tunability of a confining potential, the tunability of the size, of the form, and of the sign of the effective/bare interatomic interaction, the ability to mix different components, etc.
All the above factors introduce novel effects, which had not been investigated in the past. Remarkably all these factors are also tunable externally, and this fact allows us to manipulate them at will, realizing novel forms of matter.