Light is a fascinating field of study, but it poses extraordinary challenges. For starters, you have to be as fast as it is, or almost all its interactions will pass unnoticed. Filming light has made a spectacular leap in quality in recent years. The barrier of 100 billion FPS was shattered in 2014, while last October we reached ten trillion. Today we're sharing a recording at four trillion frames per second, a bit "slower" if you will, but longer thanks to the technique applied.
When we see an object, we can do so only thanks to the light it emits or reflects. Of course, there are more advanced visualization methods in different regions of the spectrum, but basically that's how it works for us. However, this ability is insufficient under certain conditions. There are samples so delicate that simply illuminating them destroys them, forcing us to be very quick in our observations.
The solution? Developing the fastest cameras on the planet. Some of them are already available on the market with six-figure prices (or more) and recording rates up to hundreds of thousands of FPS. However, today it's the turn of a camera that records light at four trillion frames per second.
A camera at four trillion frames per second
In general, these extreme-speed cameras store each frame of a sequence in a separate region of the sensor, but the natural limits on the size of that sensor affect the length of the recording. Feng Chen from Xi'an Jiaotong University and Lidai Wang from City University of Hong Kong explain that with their process, frames are stored in separate but overlapping areas of the sensor. Each successive frame receives a kind of random label before reaching the sensor, which helps with its later classification.
https://old.neoteo.com/un-rayo-filmado-a-103-000-cuadros-por-segundo/
The result? A sequence of 60 frames at a speed close to four trillion frames per second. The animation shows us a pulse of light entering and leaving a material, then bouncing off a mirror and repeating the cycle. We definitely hope to see more about this development, and others similar.
Source: Nature
