Ultra-short light pulses, from femtosecond optical lasers and/or X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) sources, opens up the possibility to dynamically perturb exotic properties of quantum materials, and to follow the subsequent electronic relaxation dynamics in quantum movies.

In my talk, I will first give a brief introduction to the SwissFEL, and describe its application in femtosecond time-resolved resonant inelastic and elastic X-ray scattering in condensed matter and quantum materials, including non-linear X-ray science.

It will be shown how the insight gained can be used to disentangle time-domain dynamics, from the degrees of freedom of charge, spin, orbital and lattice in strongly correlated electron materials.