Ten years after the first realization of the Bose-Einstein condensate, a strange, extreme state of matter close to absolute zero temperature, a top headline of the year 2005 reads: "Photons under control".

Decades of struggle for techniques to confine individual particles and particle clouds precede this achievement. There is no telling as yet what the full consequences will be.

Microlasers carry the miniaturization into the range between beam and wave optics, that is into the very centre of the wave-particle dualism of light founded by Einstein in 1905. Not only in order to better understand the behaviour of these lasers, the combination is on the agenda of quantum mechanics and complex dynamics of classically chaotic systems - the "Quantum Chaos".