Light photons are pretty fast. In fact, they're the speediest thing humans have ever recorded in the universe. As such, they're pretty difficult to capture on film, but researchers at the University of Washington in St. Louis have developed a camera fast enough to photograph light phenomena.
The scientists say the new camera is the fastest 2-D camera in the world, capable of taking photos at a record-breaking rate of 100 billion frames per second. The camera uses a technique called Compressed Ultrafast Photography, which captures photons and collects data that is later converted into a 2-D image on a computer. The next fastest receive-only cameras top out at 10 million frames per second.
The device consists of a streak camera, which is augmented by a series of extra components — a combination of microscopes, telescopes and various lenses. Streak cameras are used to observe and measure the movement of light, but they can only capture a single dimension. The add-ons, assembled by lead engineer Lihong Wang and his colleagues, expand the camera's capabilities to two dimensions.
Central to the camera's technology is a digital micromirror. After captured photons are funneled through a small tube, they arrive at the micromirror, which encodes the image. Next the photons are redirected into to a beam splitter, which shoots the photons into the streak camera's slit while simultaneously converting them into electrons. The raw data is collected and reasembled in image form on a computer.
"For the first time, humans can see light pulses on the fly," Wang said in a press release. "Because this technique advances the imaging frame rate by orders of magnitude, we now enter a new regime to open up new visions. Each new technique, especially one of a quantum leap forward, is always followed a number of new discoveries. It's our hope that CUP will enable new discoveries in science — ones that we can't even anticipate yet."
Wang, whose work is detailed in the journal Nature, says the new CUP technology could have significant applications in the fields of biomedicine, astronomy and forensics — capable of studying the movement of proteins at light speed, or analyzing supernovas in new detail.
"Combine CUP imaging with the Hubble Telescope, and we will have both the sharpest spatial resolution of the Hubble and the highest temporal solution with CUP," Wang said. "That combination is bound to discover new science."
