Post by plutronus on Nov 10, 2018 6:04:27 GMT -6
T-CUP camera captures ten trillion frames per second
10/24/2018
By Gail Overton - Senior Editor
Nothing beats a clear image, says Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS; Quebec City, QC, Canada) professor and ultrafast imaging specialist Jinyang Liang. He and his colleagues, led by Caltech's Lihong Wang, have developed what they call T-CUP: the world's fastest camera, as described in a Nature journal, capable of capturing ten trillion (1013) frames per second (fps). This new camera literally makes it possible to freeze time to see phenomena--and even light--in extremely slow motion.
In recent years, the junction between innovations in nonlinear optics and imaging has opened the door for new and highly efficient methods for microscopic analysis of dynamic phenomena in biology and physics. But to harness the potential of these methods, there needs to be a way to record images in real time at a very short temporal resolution--in a single exposure.
Using current imaging techniques, measurements taken with ultrashort laser pulses must be repeated many times, which is appropriate for some types of inert samples, but impossible for other more fragile ones. For example, laser-engraved glass can tolerate only a single laser pulse, leaving less than a picosecond to capture the results. In such a case, the imaging technique must be able to capture the entire process in real time.
Compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) was a good starting point them. At 100 billion frames per second, this method approached, but did not meet, the specifications required to integrate femtosecond lasers. To improve on the concept, the new T-CUP system was developed based on a femtosecond streak camera that also incorporates a data acquisition type used in applications such as tomography.
"We knew that by using only a femtosecond streak camera, the image quality.....
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