An international team of scientists has tailored special X-ray glasses to concentrate the beam of an X-ray laser stronger than ever before. The individually produced corrective lens eliminates the inevitable defects of an X-ray optics stack almost completely and concentrates three quarters of the X-ray beam to a spot with 250 nanometres (millionths of a millimetre) diameter, closely approaching the theoretical limit. The concentrated X-ray beam can not only improve the quality of certain measurements, but also opens up entirely new research avenues, as the team surrounding DESY lead scientist Christian Schroer writes in the journal Nature Communications.