  Efimov's prediction more than three decades ago that three-body bound states
can exist when the pairwise attractions do not bind or only support weakly
bound states of a pair, has remained unconfirmed till just the past year. This
lecture provides the pedagogical background for recent work on Efimov states in
neutron-rich nuclei done with I. Mazumdar (TIFR) and V. S. Bhasin (Delhi
University), and published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 062503 (2006). Both these
nuclear systems and recent observations of cold cesium atoms provide the first
clear evidence for the existence of Efimov states.
