Abstract
Since the first days of the ruby laser 50 years ago, laser systems have steadily improved thanks to advances in laser gain media and mirror technology. On the one hand, incredibly powerful lasers have been developed for fusion research that are able to deliver huge pulses of energy to their targets, resulting in local environments similar to the interior of the Sun; on the other, we now have lasers that can precisely deliver ultrashort pulses of energy to atomic, molecular and condensed-matter systems to trigger various physical processes and to measure their instantaneous characteristics.
