The World’s Fastest Camera Can Take 10 Trillion Images Per Second

A new camera from Caltech can almost freeze time. It can produce pictures at an unimaginable rate. Using it we can take pictures of lasers in flight and many other such fast things.

Nowadays we easily create devices that are beyond our senses. But sometimes they go beyond our imagination. One such device is a new ultrafast camera – which is now the fastest camera in the world. It is called T-CUP and it can up to ten trillion images per second - that’s 1 followed by 12 zeroes.

Lihong Wang – an optical engineer from Caltech and his team are capable of pretty much stopping time when they’re using it. They can then record extremely fast events that would otherwise be completely imperceptible to us. With the insanely fast T-CUP, we can observe interactions between light and matter in scales of just nanometers and similar. Last year a Swedish team claimed the record for the worlds fastest camera with their device capable of producing up to 5 trillion images per second. This means the new champion is two times as fast.

Wang’s team used a femtosecond streak camera and combined it with a static camera. Then they used the Radon transform method – that is being used in its inverse form for example in reconstructing images from computer tomography in medicine. The scientists understood that if they used only the femtosecond streak camera the quality of the images would be… limited. But when combined with the static camera they managed to get high-quality pictures.

And when they built the camera they knew it was time to try it out. They photographed a single pulse of a femtosecond laser. A femtosecond is just one quadrillionth of a second – If we we’re to imagine one femtosecond as just a single second then a real second would be equal to almost 32 million years. The scientists took 25 pictures during a period of 400 femtoseconds and as you can see we can clearly see changes in the shape, intensity, and the angle of the laser pulse.

The study authors know that their new camera is quite a success. But it isn’t enough for them. They want to achieve one quadrillion images per second – a thousand trillion - and break through even more mysteries of science.

Sources:
http://www.inrs.ca/english/actualites/worlds-fastest-camera-freezes-time-10-trillion-frames-second
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-018-0044-7

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