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World's Fastest Camera Shoots 10 Trillion Frames a Second (newatlas.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the that's-a-lot-of-zeros dept.

bbsguru shares a report from New Atlas: Slow-motion video has always been fun to watch, with the best rigs usually shooting on the scale of thousands of frames per second. But now the world's fastest camera, developed by researchers at Caltech and INRS, blows them out of the water, capturing the world at a mind-boggling 10 trillion frames per second -- fast enough to probe the nanoscale interactions between light and matter. For the new imaging technique, the team started with compressed ultrafast photography (CUP), a method that it is capable of 100 billion fps. That's nothing to scoff at by itself, but it's still not fast enough to really capture what's going on with ultrafast laser pulses, which occur on the scale of femtoseconds. A femtosecond, for reference, is one quadrillionth of a second.

So the team built on that technology by combining a femtosecond streak camera and a static camera, and running it through a data acquisition technique known as Radon transformation. This advanced system was dubbed T-CUP. For the first test, the camera proved its worth by capturing a single femtosecond pulse of laser light, recording 25 images that were each 400 femtoseconds apart. Through this process, the team could see the changes in the light pulse's shape, intensity and angle of inclination, in much slower motion than ever before.

2 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What's the resolution? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    This isn't definitive, but one of their previous papers shows images at 150 x 150.
    (See bottom of page 3: https://authors.library.caltech.edu/67908/11/nihms636729.pdf)

    I'm guessing that since they are looking at frickin lasers, they aren't too concerned about getting much better than that.

  2. Re:The reason we use exponents by Solandri · · Score: 4, Informative
    Some more intuitive descriptions:
    • In one femtosecond, light will travel 0.3 micrometers (0.0003 mm).
    • In the 400 femtoseconds between the successive image frames shot with this camera, light travels only 0.1 mm.
    • If you shot one second at 10 trillion fps, and played them back at 60 fps of YouTube video, it would take over 5000 years to watch that one second.