Congratulations to Richard Haglund and Kent Hallman for their Nature Physics publication. This paper is the latest from a multi-year, multi-national (United States, Germany, Denmark, South Korea, France, United Kingdom) collaboration in which Vanderbilt’s part was the preparation and characterization (in conjunction with the Technical University-Berlin) of a challenging ultrathin holographic gold-vanadium dioxide “sandwich” on an X-ray transparent silicon nitride window for ultrafast X-ray holography studies – that in this paper yielded a simultaneous time-resolved (less than 100 femtoseconds), space-resolved (50 nm resolution) movie of the metal-insulator transition in vanadium dioxide, one of the most important quantum materials for photonic and electronic technologies.