World's fastest new camera can see lasers moving at 10 trillion frames per second

T-CUP Facility (INRS)

What do you do if your experiment is too fast for even the world’s fastest camera to see? For Caltech’s For three researchers, the answer is simple: build a faster camera. Previously, the world's fastest cameras had frame rates of billionths of a second. That's really fast - a hundred billionth of a second the speed of light is just enough for a beam of light to travel the length of a sesame seed. But not fast enough.

Researchers have developed a technique called "temporal focusing" in which laser pulses are fired in a very short, compressed time. The entire beam bursts out at once, and researchers know that lasers that are temporally focused behave differently than lasers fired over longer periods of time. (10 Real-Life Superhero Techniques) "KDSPE" and "KDSPs", but existing cameras are too slow to study them. Among other super-fast exercises, there are ways to go about this. Researchers sometimes run the same experiment over and over again in front of a too-slow camera until the camera collects enough different frames of action to string them together into a complete movie. That wouldn't work for hitting a compression laser into a surface like etched glass, though; the researchers wanted to see what that looked like, but they knew it looked different every time. There is no way to string together multiple experiments into one movie.

T-CUP images show femtosecond laser pulses developing at astonishing speed. (Liang Jinyang, Zhu Liren, Wang Lihong)

Three scientists proposed a technology they called 10 trillion frames per second compressed ultra-high-speed photography (T-CUP). One hundred times faster than the fastest previous recording methods, T-CUP works by combining movie data with data from still images. As the researchers describe in a paper published August 8 in the journal Nature, the T-CUP splits the laser image into two devices: a motion recorder and a single exposure of the scene. camera. The movie camera captured the scene as close to a scream as it could have seen. A still camera captures the entire motion of the laser in one smear.

The computer then combines the data from both cameras, using the still camera's smeared image to fill in the gaps in the movie. The result? A 450×150 pixel video lasts for 350 frames.

Originally published in the journal Life Sciences.