The paper is highly cited because it was the first demonstration of sub-picosecond time-resolved x-ray diffraction. To attain this goal had been a so-called holy grail of ultrafast spectroscopy ever since the advent of femtosecond lasers around 1980. The field is now rapidly expanding and this leads therefore to many citations of our initial results.

Femtosecond experiments study the fastest processes in biology or chemistry, such as the very first event in light-capture by the eye. With x-ray diffraction we can directly measure the movement of the individual atoms in the sample, but it has proved difficult to use this technique on the femtosecond time scale. Our work was the first demonstration that it was at all feasible. Presently, the technique is being improved upon by a handful of research groups around the world.

After finishing my Ph.D. I came to the Laboratoire d'Optique Appliquée in France to work with Jean-Louis Martin on the application of ultrafast x-rays in biophysics. It turned out that we had to begin the experiments with simple samples, and these experiments were done in a very close collaboration between Antoine Rousse and myself along with a number of other collaborators.