We quite often group matter into two categories fermions and bosons. fermions are opposite to bosons due to the fact that matter is conserved during particle interactions with fermions (ie that the net amount of fermions is a constant). The electron is considered to be the archetypal fermion against the photon which is considered popularly to be the archetypal boson. Bosons possess integar or zero spin against half integer fermion spin. We consider quarks to be a separate family to the lepton, even though all known matter is constructed from them, though such sweeping comments should seldom be made as one may very well return a comment asking what makes singlets. Tachyons are a different type of particle, they have irrational mass. Gluons should be grouped with bosons as they carry the same function as photons.
First produced last year by a NIST-University of Colorado group, Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) comprise a new state of matter in which gas atoms, cooled to near-absolute-zero temperatures, overlap with each other and collapse into a common quantum state, where they behave essentially as a single "superparticle." At the American Physical Society Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics meeting in May 1999 at the University of Michigan, Wolfgang Ketterle and his colleagues at MIT announced that they had produced a Bose-Einstein condensate of 5 million atoms, an order of magnitude larger than any previous BEC. At 150 microns long and 8 microns wide, the condensate was large enough to be directly observed for the first time. The MIT researchers shone laser light onto the condensate and imaged the scattered light with a sensitive camera. What they saw was a direct image of an atomic matter wave with a half wavelength of 150 microns. Performing the first study of the BEC's optical properties, the MIT group found that the sodium condensate acts as a lens and that the light scattered off the condensate is anisotropic: in that it scatters light preferentially in certain directions. To produce the condensate, the researchers used a combination of lasers and magnetic fields in a special configuration in which cloverleaf-shaped coils generate magnetic fields that tightly confine the atoms while allowing the setup's 11 lasers to pass easily into the trapping region.
The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News Number 272 May 23, 1996 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein