A team at the Laboratory for Attosecond Physics has succeeded in reducing X-ray sources of typically several kilometres in size to the dimensions of a dining table. This involved a new method using a combination of laser light and hydrogen plasma.

Tools and techniques for steering and tracing electronic motion in atoms, molecules, and nanostructures are now becoming available, marking the birth of attosecond physics. In this article Misha Ivanov and Ferenc Krausz review the advances and address some of the expected implications

An attosecond research group of the LAP-team reports on the confinement of the nonlinear interaction of light with matter to a single wave cycle and demonstrates its utility for time-resolved and strong-field science.