The Quest for Ultra-Short X-Ray Pulses

Chemical bonds form, change, or break on a femtosecond timescale. Recording a 'molecular movie' with an atomic-scale spatial resolution at the timescale set by atomic motion is a critical step in understanding these processes that can be accomplished by using ultra-short x-ray pulses. In the first part of this talk I will discuss several ideas for a generation of femtosecond x-ray pulses using spontaneous emission of electrons. Some of them, like the laser 'slicing' technique, are now routinely used at several storage-ring-based synchrotron light sources; others, like an rf orbit deflection technique, is under construction at the Advanced Photon Source. Nowadays, the femtosecond x-ray pulses are also routinely produced by x-ray free electron lasers (FELs). In the second part of this talk I will discuss how one can use FELs to obtain even shorter x-ray pulses down to attosecond timescale.