In December 2014, we discussed a camera capable of capturing images at 100 billion frames per second. That number is staggering by any measure, but it wasn't enough for the experts, led by Professor Lihong Wang of the University of Washington. Now, Wang works under the wing of Caltech, and he and his team are back with the world's fastest camera, which captures ten trillion frames per second. The most impressive part? They're convinced they can make it even faster.
Everything starts with a giant obviousness: light is fast. Reaching a fraction of its speed could change space exploration forever, at least when it comes to the Solar System. But that's not the only thing we care about. Its behavior around certain elements or under special conditions is very important, but the very nature of light complicates things. In relaxed terms, if we want to “see” what it does, we have to “move” as fast as it does. This is also critical for working with samples that are too fragile, which barely tolerate a laser pulse. The solution? Create the world's fastest camera. How fast? Well... let's say that the ten frames per second of the Nikon D500 are essentially insignificant.
The World's Fastest Camera
According to its creators, led by professors Jinyang Liang and Lihong Wang (now at Caltech), this monster records 10 trillion frames per second. Those are our trillions, or 10^13 to clear any doubts. Its design is based on the so-called T-CUP technology, an upgrade of Compressed Ultrafast Photography (CUP) that they already used previously. With traditional CUP, the scientists achieved a not-at-all-shabby 100 billion frames per second... but it's not enough. What they need is to integrate laser systems in the range of just a femtosecond. This enables the analysis of interactions between light and matter at unprecedented temporal resolution.
The final result is a 450-by-150-pixel video that lasts 350 frames, and anyone would be satisfied with that, but not them. In fact, they're convinced they can develop an even faster variant. They even dared to risk a number: One quadrillion frames per second (10^15). Something tells me we won't have to wait long to see it in action...
