A recent edition of Nature News featured the international race to build X-ray free electron laser facilities. At the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), Stanford, USA, scientists have succeeded in lasing 8 keV X-rays and started to use them in their research since April, this year (2009). Meanwhile, soft X-ray laser FLASH, which is a pilot facility for XFEL at the European X-Ray Free-Electron Laser (XFEL), Hamburg, Germany, has been open for scientific use since 2005, and the main XFEL will be completed in 2014. Nature News interviewed various people both in Stanford (Joachim Stohr, Jerome Hastings and John Bozek) and Hamburg (Heinz Graafsma, Helmut Dosch and Massimo Altarelli). For more information, see the article, "X-ray free-electron lasers fire up", Eric Hand, Nature 461, 708-709 (2009).
