MIT's New Camera Can Take 1 Trillion Frames Per Second

First time accepted submitter probain writes "MIT has made a camera that can take trillion frames per second! With this high speed capability, they can actually see the movement of photons of light across a scene or object. This is just mind-boggling." ExtremeTech has a nice video of the system, too. What would you like to see slowed down to such a degree?

Comments

What

[Anonymous Coward]

they can actually see the movement of photons of light across a scene or object

...no.

Re:What

[buchner.johannes]

Well they can, just not individual photons or individual photon events.
It's exactly the same as an oscilloscope -- you also don't see the shape of an individual pulse. You under-sample, and then add the samples together assuming it was always the same pulse.

Re:What

[vlm]

they can actually see the movement of photons of light across a scene or object

...no.

Sure you can. I've seen the nuke test footage. I'm not talking about the stereotypical "wind gust front" but actual "light" output. The first few frames are classified and I have not seen them, because they show asymmetries that imply various things about internal construction, but once the fireball gets a couple feet across its pretty much perfectly spherical and that's the unclassified frames I've seen. If there were a useful way to search youtube / google / archive.org for a description like this, I'd give you a link to the actual movie. You can distinctly see the disk of light hit the ground and expand very rapidly circularly underneath the slowly growing fireball, well, slowly growing compared to the speed of light, anyway. There are not many frames to this "movie" probably synchronization of the cameras and the "bang" was harder back in the 50s. The footage is many decades old.

I believe the relevant part of the story is this might be the first "trillion fps" camera that isn't classified and is owned by "civilians"

Re:What

[vlm]

Well they can, just not individual photons or individual photon events.
It's exactly the same as an oscilloscope -- you also don't see the shape of an individual pulse. You under-sample, and then add the samples together assuming it was always the same pulse.

Only with digital scopes. With analog that's exactly how it works, you can, if you want, see literally one pulse. Not much analog scopes on professional desktops anymore... they're all on hardware hackers basement desks now, like mine. Thats why I bring it up, on average across /. readership there are probably more analog scope users than digital scope users. That would make an interesting /. poll,
1) I use an analog scope
2) I use a digital scope
3) Cowboy Neal is a my scope
4) Whats an oscilloscope?

Re:What

[GrpA]

No... The OP is correct.

This isn't new technology. It's called "Gated Image Intensifier Photography" and is used for everything from Lidar to special night vision devices that can see underwater. It is one of the few technologies that allows detection of stealth submarines by taking images of the submarine without the backscatter caused by water in front of it. It's one of the only technologies that can track supercavitating weapons underwater. It can also help see through many obscurants.

It's like a flashlight, except you only look at light reflected at a particular time after the flash ( usually a laser ) goes off. As a result, you can choose to see light that is only reflected from, say, 100m away to 101m away. Everything else looks dark and because of this, it's a good technology for seeing through trees and the likes.

If you want to understand gating of image tubes and streak tubes in particular ( what they use - an electronically steerable image intensifier that can track very high speed objects such as bullets being fired from a gun ) just look up Image Tubes by Illes P Csorba. A great book.

What they are doing here is just gating the image a little faster and repeating it often to capture very short duration repetative events in high detail. Not a new technology, just a variation on existing tech.

And you'll find many modern Gen3 NV devices are autogated, meaning they do this automatically, though it's more a way to pulse-width modulate the light coming in so that they can work under brighter conditions, such as when soldiers burst into a room and the enemy turns on the lights inside...

GrpA

Re:What

[Maddog Batty]

A succinct answer and basically correct.

My understanding of this is the clever part is the very short pulsed laser combined with a very short exposure camera. Each laser pulse send lots of photons together in a bunch across the field of view of the camera. Some clever camera synchronisation allows each "frame" taken by the camera to be slightly (pico seconds) later than the previous one. When run as a movie, this appears to show a light pulse as moves across the field of view.

However, it doesn't take a picture of a single photon - it takes pictures of a bunch of photons and neither does it take a movie of the same bunch of photons moving across the field of view - each frame is taken of a different laser pulse.

(for simplicity I've ignored the fact that the camera is a line scan camera rather than full frame camera)

Re:What

[vlm]

If you have a rare and expensive quad channel scope, watch the TX and RX, AND the hardware control lines and have fun telling them how fast their interrupt service routines are, this used to completely freak out OS/device driver developers (so... you mean you just look on a scope, instead of hand counting theoretical instructions?)

I will admit you are correct, if you have way too much money you can buy direct non undersampling digital scopes. Or I suppose if you're only monitoring audio speed signals or whatever.

Re:What

[vlm]

thats pretty interesting. Is a possible countermeasure against this, parking your tank behind two nearly perpendicular mirrors so the beam path between the two mirrors is like 100 miles?

Or would parking your tank behind a mirror make the terrain behind the tank look just like the terrain in front of the tank, but backwards... that might be too easy to detect after all...

Re:What

[GrpA]

Yes, since it's "Active" illumination, you just detect from which direction the flash of light is coming from - though you need a very wideband detector since it could be anywhere on the spectrum and will almost certainly be infrared above 1000nm...

Then once you see the person aiming their "LIDAR" at you, you swivel the tank's gun and send some high-velocity non-photonic matter their way... Probably the most effective countermeasure.

Most of this technology uses very long wavelength ( around 1500nm ) light so that it's not going to be obvious what you're doing. It also tends to work over very long distances, eg, 10Km away... :) It's more used for detection and identification of enemy equipment at long range under conditions of darkness.

Even then I don't think it's all that common. Thermal is more practical for detection now and I imagine Lidar is special use only ( eg, when very high resolution images are required, when topological information is important or for underwater use ) -

GrpA

Re:What

[tzanger]

Nothing impresses non-geeks like hooking up a scope to an RS232 line and reading off the bit rate and data format...

I'm pretty sure non-techies don't have a clue what RS232 is, nor care about the bit rate and data format. :-) It does tend to impress the protogeeks and the more experienced geek squad techs, though.

Re:What

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the relevant part of the story is this might be the first "trillion fps" camera that isn't classified and is owned by "civilians"

Streak cameras with picosecond resolution or below have been available off the shelf for decades. They were really expensive and are still pricey now, even if a lot cheaper. So not within the reach of most hobbyists, although still available to civilians with money or some salvaging luck.

I am not sure about being able to see an advancing light front off of nuclear test footage, at least in a 2D film instead of something like a 1D stream camera. By the 60s, I think the highest speed cameras were on the order of 10,000 fps, which means light would go about 30 km in one frame. Even with current technology, it would be difficult to have a full movie at such speeds of a single event, as the highest speed cameras are usually limited to some set number of frames before requiring some time to reset (something like 1-8 frames are common, although larger ones exist).

Re:What

[jdastrup]

TFA says they are using 500 cameras (CCD's) to accomplish this task. And isn't video simply many still frames put together? So what's the difference?

Re:What

[timeOday]

Not a new technology, just a variation on existing tech.

I have never seen a new technology appear that was not met with that reaction on slashdot. I think people have some serious misconceptions about what science looks like when you follow it on a daily or weekly basis. Step functions exist only in theory.

Re:What

[vlm]

Then once you see the person aiming their "LIDAR" at you, you swivel the tank's gun and send some high-velocity non-photonic matter their way... Probably the most effective countermeasure.

I detect an economic problem when the cost of a dumb "transmit only" laser diode and microcontroller to pulse it costs less than cannon round. A tactical problem if you build a "tank detector" fortification using a dazzler in a safe area (nothing important downrange of it) and an anti-tank team preposition along a flank of the dazzler's LOS, the big boom from the tank wakes up the sleeping opfor anti-tank team who promptly make an even bigger boom outta the tank... Also a tactical problem if your tank only carries 40 odd rounds and the opfor issues a clip on dazzler decoy device to a couple hundred infantry escorting like two real live opfor tanks, hmm which do I pop odds are only 1 in 100. I suppose you pop the two big thermal plumes, but still the freak out factor must count for something, maybe combined with other surprises...

20 yrs ago I worked on the logistical computer systems for ammo in the USAR so I know those shells are quite expensive, and I do stuff with cheap microcontrollers and some laser diode stuff now, so I know I can build a decoy for maybe 1/10 the cost of a shell.

Re:What

[dna_(c)(tm)(r)]

Well they can, just not individual photons or individual photon events. It's exactly the same as an oscilloscope -- you also don't see the shape of an individual pulse. You under-sample, and then add the samples together assuming it was always the same pulse.

That would make an interesting /. poll, 1) I use an analog scope 2) I use a digital scope 3) Cowboy Neal is a my scope 4) Whats an oscilloscope?

3) CowboyNeal is out of scope

Re:What

[Hatta]

What you are seeing is probably a sphere of expanding plasma. It can't possibly be a "sphere of light" because light travels at the speed of light. By the time you could see the sphere, you would be inside it.

Re:What

[EdIII]

To put it another way, it's like saying the BBQ is just a variation on a campfire and not really all that impressive. Well... that's a pretty interesting variation with many practical applications.

Variations, if they allow new functions and capabilities, does not invalidate it's worth simply because it re-purposes existing tech.

Re:What

[Dogtanian]

I'm pretty sure non-techies don't have a clue what RS232 is

That's what you think. Of course we've heard of RS232, he was C3PO's boyfriend in the Star Trek films!

Wish to see?

[unixcrab]

1. The electron beam scanning in a CRT. 2. Inside a cylinder of an internal combustion engine. 3. A lightning strike (too difficult maybe)

Re:Wish to see?

[Fahrvergnuugen]

Pretty cool even for "normal" high speed photography

Re:Wish to see?

[Jaqenn]

Tim Samaras is a storm researcher who has captured lightning strikes at 10,000 frames per second:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyUsjsJ-E0c

It's not 1,000,000,000,000 FPS, but it's still pretty cool.

Re:Wish to see?

[RivenAleem]

10,000 FPS should be enough for anyone.

Re:Wish to see?

[Surt]

I know you're being funny, but just because I hope to correct this misconception in the long run:
24 is not enough for everyone. The actual number required is closer to 240. That is the point at which not even the 99th percentile of eye responsiveness can detect the frames, and perceive instead smooth motion.

i'd be dead before that water balloon pops

[Anonymous Coward]

played back at 24fps, it would take over 1,000 years to watch 1 second of video captured at 1,000,000,000,000fps.

Re:i'd be dead before that water balloon pops

[SJHillman]

If my math is right, light travels a little over 1/100th of an inch (or a little under 0.3 mm) per frame.

Re:i'd be dead before that water balloon pops

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that photons ARE light, and the camera CONSUMES them by seeing them.

You can never see the same photon twice. The act of seeing absorbs it.

Re:i'd be dead before that water balloon pops

[GrpA]

They are talking about shutter rates, not image capture rates... Big difference.

It probably has quite a slow frame rate.

GrpA

Re:i'd be dead before that water balloon pops

[catmistake]

analogous to the strobe light, dripping water thingy... where fast drops of water appear to be moving in slow motion because the strobe light only lets you see a drop at a certain point, and then another drop at a point a little further than the last... what looks like a slow motion drop of water is actually many drops of water, strobed.

I could use this at work...

[SJHillman]

I love the whooshing sound deadlines make as they fly by, maybe this will slow them down enough to see what they look like too!

Hmmm

[DWMorse]

What would you like to see slowed down to such a degree?

Hint: It involves a trampoline, or maybe a wet tshirt...

Re:Hmmm

[mbone]

You realize that at a picosecond frame rate it would take about a year of watching at 30 frames per second to actually see any motion of a person on a trampoline at all, and maybe a century to observe an single bounce ?

Re:Hmmm

[mbone]

Relying on Slashdot for sexual gratification is worse than relying on Slashdot for legal advice, and that's saying something.

Bullshit detector goes beep

[tpotus]

I watched the video and can only conclude that it doesn't make any sense at all. Slow motion video of a moving photon? Give me a break.

Re:Bullshit detector goes beep

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't get it. What you see are the photons deflected by the air off of their original path. When the light is in the middle of the bottle it has actually already exited it. The cameras capture the deflected photons. In a perfect vacuum you would not be able to see anything.

Re:Bullshit detector goes beep

[swalve]

It sounds like they aren't actually capturing 1T fps in real time. They are simulating it by capturing identical scenes at very slightly different intervals. Sort of a wagon wheel effect, or that effect that made the rounds a couple of months ago where they "captured" the movement of guitar strings. Take a machine gun that fires bullets once per second. Take a camera that takes photographs every 1.000000001 seconds. Fire a trillion bullets and take a trillion photographs. Each photograph will show a different bullet, one trillionth of a second further along the path. If you play them back, it looks like a single bullet going really slow.

Re:Bullshit detector goes beep

[GrpA]

Well I could just say "With your eyes" but I figure the question is "How do you see a single photon?"

You amplify it by converting it to a photoelectron with a very sensitive photocathode, then you add more electrons through either linear acceleration and multiple electron/photon stages or with a MicroChannel Plate ( MCP ) which causes secondary electrons to multiply the number of electrons, then you accelerate it over a short distance to around 5,000 to 10,000 eV and then smack it into a aluminized phosphor screen, which converts the electrons back to photons, but a HEAP of them so they are visible.

They can also focus and steer the electrons inside the tube. That's why it's called a "streak tube"... :)

I have seen photons many times. Kind of cool seeing a picture made from just a few photons, but it has to be REALLY dark to do this and you have to get your own eyes accustomed to the dark as well. The pictures sometimes just look like static until you collect a whole heap of them in a timed exposure.

When you amplify light about 100,000 times and then take a 15 second exposure and it *still* looks dark, you know the original image was exceptionally dark.

GrpA

Re:Bullshit detector goes beep

[vlm]

Exactly. How do you see a photon?

If its high enough energy / high enough freq / low enough wavelength we call it a gamma particle and you watch ionized air particles it left behind as it passes thru.

Thats kinda abstract because we're not looking at "it" but more what it did to the air as it wooshed by.

Maybe a closer example would be cerenkov radiation, essentially a visual sonic boom as one goes thru something with a lower speed of light (some plastics have a really low speed of light, which makes them pretty good lens material). I guess if you make a plastic scintilator type of thingy with a continuously changing refractive index so the particle continuously emits cerenkov radiation then you could kinda argue you're seeing "it", although we're destroying it in the process of seeing it so...

Cerenkov radiation is what leads to 2nd order BS WRT the color of radiation. Comic books trained kids radioactive stuff glows green, thats the 1st order BS. Actually visiting a test or experimental reactor quickly trains them to the 2nd order BS that radiation is blue (inspiration for star trek tng engines, I guess). Trust me, neutrons, by themselves, are not actually green or blue.

Re:Bullshit detector goes beep

[mbone]

I think they mean that in a perfect vacuum, there would be nothing in the bottle and thus nothing to scatter.

Re:Bullshit detector goes beep

[dmatos]

Ah. Further reading at the MIT site indicates that they are reading at "1THz line rate". They use a varying electric field inside the camera slit to deflect the photons by different amounts onto a 2-D image sensor. Thus, on the sensor, the x-direction contains spatial information, and the y-direction contains temporal information.

They can do this by sweeping the strength of the electric field inside the streak camera's slit quickly. Photons arriving at different times are deflected by different amounts, and thus hit different pixels in the 2-D sensor behind the slit.

Cue the $6M man theme sound

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Each movie that camera makes is dubbed with the sound of Steve Austin running for dramatic effect.

Slashdot Story Misses the More Exciting Point

[MyLongNickName]

This grew out of a system to see around corners. The professor wanted to build a camera that could analyze the path of reflected light to get pictures around ninety degree angles. This is a really amazing concept, moreso than simply getting a camera to take ever increasingly fast pictures.

if you are interested in learning more and have a lecture's worth of time on your hand, please check one out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKu20y1f_RU

Streak cameras

[Anonymous Coward]

Streak cameras have been around for decades. They take a one dimensional source of light, and sweep it across a 2D detector very quickly so that the second dimension gives you the time resolution much shorter than the exposure time used by the sensor. Streak cameras with time resolution in picoseconds is pretty common, and many have sub-picosecond resolution. The problem is that once the a light source is swept across the camera, you are limited by the time it takes to read and reset the sensor before you can repeat the process, giving you the same repetition rate as high speed 2D cameras. So you might have 100 fs time resolution, but it would be one dimensional, and only last for 100 ps, before having to wait a few microseconds to milliseconds to take another image (there are some tricks to get two images given one sensor before reading it, and some high end cameras will just have multiple sensors in parallel to get faster successive images).

The novelty here seems not to be the camera, but the use of a laser for illumination and the stitching of many 1D images taken over an hour or so together into one 2D image.

Baywatch

[gaelfx]

Any time there is any advancement in the field of slow motion video capture, the only answer is Baywatch.

Re:They can see a photon???

[GrpA]

Nope, they can actually visualise a single photon if the gain is sufficient, eg, Super Inverter Image Intensifier ( also known as Gen3+1 ) - Typical photonic gain levels of around 300,000x -

Neat huh?

Of course, that's assuming the photon is converted into a photoelectron by the photocathode, which depends on the QE ( Quantum Efficiency ) of the photocathode material.. And assuming the photon isn't lost in any AlO films inside the device... Then yes, they can actually see individual photons.

They can count photons too with photomultipliers, but image intensifiers will let you put them into an image... :)

GrpA

Oblig. Futurama (paraphrased)

[Dachannien]

Morbo: Photons do not work that way! Good night!

Seriously. You can't detect a photon unless it actually collides with the detector. So how do you detect movement of photons across a scene?

Re:Oblig. Futurama (paraphrased)

[DriedClexler]

So how do you detect movement of photons across a scene?

Well, you assume the photons expand out radially from the source, and therefore, watching the light propagate from left to right across your field of vision, you assume that the photos that hit your detector (such as your eyes), are roughly coplanar with the (majority of) photons that aren't hitting your detector.

You know, like what happens when you look at the beam coming out of a flashlight from the side.

(Remember: to make inferences, you must make assumptions. Your visual system makes inferences.)

It's just that, with fine-grained enough snapshots, you can see what the beam looks like before it has propagated across your entire field of vision.

Yes, quantum behavior of photons is complicated, but sometimes we overcomplicate it.

Re:Oblig. Futurama (paraphrased)

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't watch light propagate across your field of vision. What you see from a flashlight is _scattered_ light coming from a beam propagating across your field of vision. Any thing that you sense by vision, or that in instrument detects through photon interactions, is the result of photons hitting your eye or the instrument respectively; that implies that those photons are _not_ traveling across the field of vision.

Related is the quantum measurement problem--anything you do to that photon is likely to perturb its momentum dramatically, so there's not much chance of "watching" a photon propagate at all. Detect where it is one instant, and the next instant it will be on a trajectory unrelated to its previous one.

Not sure who "we" are, but I think you might be over-representing your expertise in this matter. Not being able to see photons propagating isn't a quantum vs. classical issue, it's a problem with how light propagates and what it means to "see" something.

Time to watch

[mbone]

Times, at 30 fps, to watch

- a lightning strike move 1 meter : ~ 1 week
- one bullet streak by Neo's head : ~ 100 days
- one boob bounce on Baywatch : ~ 1 century

Better bring lots of popcorn.

Summary misses the camera's use-case: Chemistry

[gentryx]

The real use-case for the camera is not to watch at coke bottles at super slo-mo, but to investigate how molecules absorb light of different wave-lengths. There is a real scientific need for this camera. And of course, as mentioned earlier, it can't trace individual photons.

ps: needless to say that I did like my own summary much better (for being informative), but that may just be me.

Whoa!

[jman.org]

What would I like to see slowed down to such a degree?

Anything from the U.S. Senate. Those guys move waaaaaay to fast.