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The development of XFELs

X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) have rapidly developed into unique tools for probing diverse systems of interest to different scientific disciplines with angstrom–femtosecond resolution. Claudio Pellegrini provides an overview of the milestones in the development of XFELs and their unique capabilities.

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks U. Bergmann, M. Dunne, B. Denham, Z. Huang and C.-C. Kao for many useful comments. Work carried out with the support of the US Department of Energy (Contract No. DE-AC02-76F00515).

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Correspondence to Claudio Pellegrini.

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Pellegrini, C. The development of XFELs. Nat Rev Phys 2, 330–331 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-020-0197-1

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