With the advent of ultrafast lasers, a new avenue for time-resolved experiments has opened. The primary advantage of such ultrashort lasers, where the laser power is localized in time, is that it becomes possible to reach high field strengths without overheating the system, unlike with continuous wave lasers. Consequently, nonlinear optical processes can be explored, offering a promising probe for hidden broken symmetries (Zhao et al., Nature Phys. 13(3):250–254, 2017). Furthermore, ultrafast lasers enable the formation of light-dressed states in matter. Examples include Floquet engineering of electronic band structures (Wang et al., Science 342(6157):453–457, 2013) and the creation of novel hybrid light-matter polariton modes (Basov et al., Front. Opt. Photon. 10(1):565–593, 2021). With these intense and ultrashort pulses, we can capture electronic, magnetic, and lattice dynamics with unprecedented time resolutions, ranging from picoseconds down to attoseconds. Finally, these intense electromagnetic fields allow for active control over macroscopic properties of materials by dressing the electronic states or dynamically modulating the microscopic interaction energies (Basov et al., Nature Mater. 16(11):1077–1088, 2017).