A DUTCH student at Leiden University in the Netherlands has discovered the manuscript of a key paper by Albert Einstein in the archives of one of the university’s science academies.

Rowdy Boeyink was looking through documents stored at the university’s Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics in preparation for his thesis on Paul Ehrenfest, a fellow physicist and close friend of Einstein, when he found the paper.

The German manuscript, titled Quantum theory of the monatomic ideal gas and dated December 1924, was considered one of Einstein’s last great breakthroughs when it was published in its final form a year later.

Professor Carlo Beenakker, of the university, said: “It was quite exciting when a student uncovered the delicate manuscript written in Einstein’s distinctive scrawl. You can even see Einstein’s fingerprints in some places, and it’s full of notes and mark-ups from his editor.”

High-resolution photographs of the 16-page manuscript and an account of its discovery have been posted on the institute’s website.

The paper predicted that, at temperatures near absolute zero, around minus 273C, particles in a gas can reach a state of such low energy that they clump together in one larger “mono-atom”.

In 1995 Eric Cornell and Carl Wiemann, scientists at the University of Colorado in Boulder, created the condensation described by Einstein by using a gas of the element rubidium. They were awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 2001, along with Wolfgang Ketterle, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ehrenfest, among whose papers the manuscript was found, became professor of theoretical physics at Leiden University in 1912 and seven years later invited Einstein to become a Bijzonder Hoogleraar, or special professor, there for a few weeks every year.

In a letter, he assured Einstein that he would be with “people who are really fond of you personally, and not just of the brain drippings that ooze out of you”.

Einstein later presented Ehrenfest with the fountain pen that he used to write his research on general relativity. The pen is on display in the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden.

Professor Beenakker said that the student who found the manuscript had also come across other interesting documents during his search, including a letter from Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist, and was all but certain to receive top marks on his thesis.

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