World's Fastest Camera Captures 4.4 Trillion Frames Per Second

Diggester writes Japanese researchers have recently designed a motion picture camera which is capable of capturing 4.4 trillion frames per second, making it the fastest camera in the world. The technique that allows for such speed is called STAMP (sequentially timed all-optical mapping photography). The research paper, published in the journal Nature Photonics has the full details.

Comments

Re: Playback at 24 FPS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell me I got my math wrong: one second of video would take 4650 years to play back at 30fps?

What is supposed to trigger the start of a recording that can only last such a short time?

Things that go fast

[Earthquake Retrofit]

It seems to me a camera ilke would be useful for viewing things that happen very quickly, for instance, particle collisions in an atom smasher.

Re:Things that go fast

[joe_frisch]

Most particle physics happens on much faster time scales than picoseconds. There is some slower physics but that can generally be measured by looking at the verticies where tracks diverge and calculating the time it too particles to get to those vertices.

For measuring beams rather than the individual particle collisions we can use transverse deflection structures (a sort of streak-camera on steroids) to get to resolutions of a few femtoseconds.

The original article is a nice technique, but whether it is the fastest depends on how you define "camera". It is probably the fastest for 2-d images, but there are much faster 1-d imagers.

Doesn't that come with another problem?

[Opportunist]

I mean, the speed of light is 299,792,458,000 Millimeters per second. Maybe I miscalculated something (I always get confused with the way the US names its powers of 10), but doesn't that mean that in 15 frames of this movie, light only moves for about a millimeter? Someone with more background in physics may shed some light onto this (no pun intended), but when you're dealing with stuff SO fast that it approaches the speed of light, isn't measuring and recording subject to the problem that you cannot transport information (and thus also the result of your experiment to the observing camera) faster than said speed of light?