The development of continuously pumped, mode‐locked dye lasers in the early 1970s made possible the first production of sub‐picosecond optical pulses in 1974. For the remainder of the decade, attempts to generate significantly shorter pulses of light were not particularly successful. Two new developments reported early last year have now been brought together by a group at Bell Labs to produce optical pulses only 30 femtoseconds long—3×10−14 seconds, or 14 cycles of 6200‐Å red light.

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