World’s Fastest Camera Shoots at 156.3 Trillion Frames/sec

Engineers at the INRS Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications Research Centre in Canada have created the fastest camera in the world, capable of capturing images at an incredible speed of 156.3 trillion frames per second (fps).

Typically, the slow-motion cameras found in smartphones operate at a few hundred frames per second (fps). Professional cinematic cameras can reach a few thousand fps to achieve a smoother slow-motion effect. However, to observe events at the nanoscale, one needs to significantly slow down the footage to billions or even trillions of frames per second.

Unveiling the Remarkable Temporal Precision of the New Camera

The new camera is capable of recording events that occur within femtoseconds, which are quadrillionths of a second. To provide a sense of scale, there are as many femtoseconds in one second as there are seconds in 32 million years.

This technology builds upon the researchers’ earlier work from 2014, known as compressed ultrafast photography (CUP), which could capture events at a speed of 100 billion frames per second.

Subsequently, they developed T-CUP, short for “Trillion-frame-per-second,” which achieved speeds of up to 10 trillion frames per second. In 2020, the team further improved the technology, reaching speeds of 70 trillion frames per second with a version called compressed ultrafast spectral photography (CUSP).

Achieving 156.3 Trillion Frames per Second

The researchers have once again surpassed their previous achievement, reaching an astounding 156.3 trillion frames per second.

The latest camera system, named “swept-coded aperture real-time femtophotography” (SCARF), is capable of capturing events that unfold too quickly for even earlier versions of the technology to detect. This includes phenomena such as shock waves traveling through materials or biological processes within living cells.

SCARF operates by emitting a “chirped” ultrashort pulse of laser light, which traverses through the subject or event under observation. If you visualize the light as a spectrum akin to a rainbow, the event is captured by the red wavelengths initially, followed by orange, yellow, and so forth down to violet.

Due to the rapid occurrence of the event, each successive “color” captures it at a different stage of change. This mechanism enables the pulse to record the entire event unfolding over an extraordinarily brief timeframe.

The light pulse undergoes various manipulations, including focusing, reflection, diffraction, and encoding, as it progresses through a series of components. Eventually, it reaches the sensor of a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera, where it is converted into data. This data can then be reconstructed by a computer to generate the final image.

While it’s improbable that ordinary individuals will be viewing high-speed videos of events like balloons popping captured by SCARF systems, researchers believe that documenting new ultrafast phenomena could enhance various fields such as physics, biology, chemistry, materials science, and engineering.

Read the original article on: New Atlas

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