What I want for my birthday: a table-top X-ray laser

Chad Orzel has a nice post at Uncertain Principles about work at JILA on creating table-top devices that can produce pulses of coherent X-ray emission, i.e. X-ray lasers, with energies of of several hundred eV to ~1 keV.

Given the current difficulties in producing effectively parallel beams of X-ray for use in calibrating X-ray mirrors and detectors this new technology may be very useful.