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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.

9 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. double slit experiment by Wycliffe · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This would be interesting to use to record the double slit experiment and find out what is really going on.

    1. Re:double slit experiment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If you're thinking of using the camera to record the state of the photons or electrons as they leave the slits, all you'd end up with is two distinct bars recorded on the photographic plate. If you're thinking of recording the target media itself, all you'd see is small dots accumulating into a series of bars making up an interference pattern.

    2. Re:double slit experiment by schweini · · Score: 4, Interesting

      CHeck out PBS SpaceTime's videos on the double slit experiment! Simply recording quantum things makes for very very strange outcomes:
      lhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ORLN_KwAgs

  2. Meh.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    It doesn't do 4k.

  3. The reason we use exponents by petes_PoV · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A femtosecond, for reference, is one quadrillionth of a second.

    Probably one of the world's least useful explanations.

    --
    politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
    1. Re:The reason we use exponents by GrahamJ · · Score: 2

      How many parsecs is 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.
  4. 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.

  5. Interleaved? by Jfetjunky · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is it real time, interleaved, or synchronous sub sampling (aka aliasing aka stroboscopic effect)?