Optical‐wavelength lasers are ubiquitous, from the checkout scanner at the supermarket to the CD player in your Discman. They come in all sizes, all the way down to microelectronic scales. Lasers operating at wavelengths shorter than 100 nanometers, however, have been rare and expensive behemoths ever since their first demonstration a decade ago; they rely on bulky, high‐powered optical lasers to produce the plasma conditions needed for x‐ray lasing.

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