10 years of pioneering X-ray science at the Free-Electron Laser FLASH at DESY

Free-electron lasers produce extremely brief, coherent, and bright laser-like photon pulses that allow to image matter at atomic resolution and at timescales faster than the characteristic atomic motions. In pulses of about 50 femtoseconds duration they provide as many photons as one gets in 1 s from modern storage ring synchrotron radiation facilities. FLASH, the Free-Electron Laser at DESY in Hamburg was the first FEL in the XUV/soft X-ray...