World's fastest camera shoots at 10 trillion frames per second

[Matrix]

 

 

n brief: Researchers have developed what they say is the world’s fastest camera. Dubbed the T-CUP, it can capture 10 trillion frames per second, allowing it to ‘freeze time’ and see light in super-slow motion.

Researchers from Quebec University’s Institute national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) began by looking at compressed ultrafast photography (CUP), which can capture images at around 100 billion frames per second. T-CUP improves on this technique as it’s based on a femtosecond (one quadrillionth of a second) streak camera that also incorporates a data acquisition type, which is commonly used in applications like tomography.

“We knew that by using only a femtosecond streak camera, the image quality would be limited,” says Professor Lihong Wang, the Bren Professor of Medial Engineering and Electrical Engineering at Caltech and the Director of Caltech Optical Imaging Laboratory (COIL). “So to improve this, we added another camera that acquires a static image. Combined with the image acquired by the femtosecond streak camera, we can use what is called a Radon transformation to obtain high-quality images while recording ten trillion frames per second.”

The new camera was able to capture the temporal focusing of a single femtosecond laser pulse in real time—a process that was recorded in 25 frames taken at an interval of 400 femtoseconds. It detailed the light pulse’s shape, intensity, and angle of inclination.

“This new camera literally makes it possible to freeze time to see phenomena - and even light - in extremely slow motion,” said lead author Jinyang Liang. “Although some measurements are possible, nothing beats a clear image.”

“It's an achievement in itself, but we already see possibilities for increasing the speed to up to one quadrillion (10¹⁵) frames per second!”

Now that it’s set a world record for real-time imaging speed, T-CUP is expected to power a new generation of microscopes for medical and other applications.

 

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[nir]

The New Fastest Camera in the World Sees Lasers Move at 10 Trillion Frames Per Second

 

What do you do when you have an experiment that's over too fast for even the fastest cameras in the world to see?
 

For a trio of researchers at the California Institute of Technology, the answer was simple: Build a faster camera.
 

Previously, the fastest video cameras in the world had framerates of one-one-hundred-billionth of a second. That was fast — A hundred-billionth of a second is just enough time for a beam of light to travel the length of a sesame seed. But it wasn't fast enough.
 

Researchers working with advanced lasers had developed a technique called "temporal focusing" where a laser pulse could be made to fire over incredibly short, compressed periods of time. The whole beam of light would rush out all at once, and researchers knew that temporally focused lasers behaved differently from lasers emitted over longer periods of time.
 

But the existing cameras were just too slow to study them. There were some ways to get around this problem in other ultra-fast exeriments. Researchers would sometimes run the same experiment over and over in front of the same, too-slow camera until it had collected enough different frames of action to string together into a single, complete movie.

This wouldn't work for crashing a compressed laser into a surface like etched glass though; the researchers wanted to see what that looked like, but they knew it would look different each time. There was no way to string multiple experiments together into a single movie.
 

A T-CUP image reveals a femtosecond laser pulse evolving at blistering speed.

Credit: Jinyang Liang, Liren Zhu & Lihong V. Wang

So the three scientists came up with a technology they call single-shot 10-trillion-frame-per-second compressed ultrafast photography (T-CUP). One hundred times faster than the previous fastest recording method, T-CUP works by combining movie data with data from a still image. As the researchers described in a paper published Aug. 8 in the journal Nature, T-CUP splits the image of the laser into two devices: a motion recorder and a camera that makes a single exposure of the scene. The movie camera captures the scene at the screaming edge of what's possible for it to see. The still camera makes a single, smeared shot of the laser's whole motion.
 

Then, a computer combines the data from the two cameras, using the smeared image from the still camera to fill in the gaps in the movie. The result? A 450-by-150 pixel video that lasts for 350 frames.

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[Matrix]

sorry already posted here

 

 

[DKT27]

Topics merged. Different sources for it.