American researchers present the world's fastest camera, a camera faster even than its shadow. It records 100 billion frames per second, and can see light itself moving.
The camera of the University of Washington in St. Louis surpasses this limitation, as it optically records phenomena with a single shot.
The camera, which features on the cover of the leading journal Nature, saw pulses of laser move through various media, bounce off obstacles and activate fluorescent dyes in the test tube.
In 2011, researchers at MIT presented a system with which they recorded a light pulse moving inside a plastic bottle. However, the spectacular video was created by stitching together images from many successive shots.
The out-of-this-world video that MIT researchers presented in 2011…
«For the first time, we can see light pulses in motion» exclaims Li Chong Wang, professor of Biomedical Engineering and head of the study.
The researcher reminds us that every major advance in technology tends to lead to new breakthroughs. The new camera could, for example, be attached to microscopes and telescopes, he predicts. The system has been called “compressed ultrafast photography,” or CUP. It is a series of devices that operate in a completely different way than conventional cameras.
Incoming light passes through a cylindrical array and reaches a coin-sized device covered in a million tiny mirrors measuring seven square micrometers. These mirrors encode the image and then reflect the incoming photons into a system called a streak camera , which records the change in light intensity over time.
The entire process occurs every 5 nanoseconds, or 100 billion times per second. The digital data that are collected are fed into algorithms that take on creating each frame of the final video. The new technology, researchers say, would have significant applications in biomedical studies, as it can monitor the function of fluorescent molecules used in experiments as markers.
In criminology, the new camera could reproduce the trajectory followed by a bullet until it meets the victim's body, the research team believes. Additionally, similar systems could be connected to telescopes, such as the Hubble space telescope, to record the evolution of dying stars that explode into supernovae.
The most important thing, however, is that human eyes see light traveling for the first time.
Source: news.makedonias.gr
