The light is produced by pulsed lasers, which generate amplified beams focused to intensities exceeding an atomic unit, with pulse durations as short as 50 femtoseconds.
Wavelengths extend from the far infrared to the extreme ultraviolet.
The principal application of these intense fields is control of quantum systems. My group has built computer-controlled pulse shapers to study problems as diverse as chemical bonds and quantum chaos. I also use atomic physics to study fundamental symmetries in nature. I am working on a collaborative experiment to test time reversal violation using microwave transitions in atomic rubidium.