The engineers at the Research Center for Energy, Materials and Telecommunications (INRS) in Canada have developed the fastest camera in the world, capable of shooting at an astonishing speed of 156.3 trillion frames per second (fps).
The best slow-motion cameras on phones usually work with a few hundred fps, and the work is already incredible. Professional cinematographic cameras can use a few thousand to achieve a smoother and truly impressive effect.
But if you want to see what happens at the nanoscale, you have to slow things down a lot, to billions or even trillions of frames per second. And that’s where our protagonist of today comes in, here’s the original study.
A camera that breaks all world records
Apparently, the new camera can capture events that occur in the femtosecond range, that is, quadrillionths of a second. As a reference, in one second there are as many femtoseconds as there are seconds in 32 million years.
The researchers relied on the technology they developed in 2014, known as compressed ultrafast photography (CUP), with which they could capture a measly 100 billion fps.
The next phase was called T-CUP, with the T standing for “Trillion-frame-per-second”, which was, true to its word, capable of capturing up to 10 trillion fps. In 2020, the team increased it to 70 trillion fps with a version called Compressed Ultrafast Spectral Photography (CUSP).
Now, researchers have managed to double it again, reaching the astonishing figure of 156.3 trillion frames per second. The new camera system is called “real-time coded aperture femtography” (SCARF) and can capture events that happen too quickly even for previous versions of the technology. For example, shock waves passing through matter or living cells.
How does this miraculous camera work
SCARF works by first firing an ultrashort “chirped” pulse of laser light, which passes through the event or object to be photographed. If you imagine light as a rainbow, the red wavelengths will capture the phenomenon first, followed by the oranges, yellows, and then the violets.
Since the event happens so quickly, by the time each successive “color” arrives, it already looks different, allowing the pulse to capture the entire change in an incredibly short period of time.
Next, this pulse of light passes through a series of components that focus, reflect, diffract, and encode it, until it finally reaches the sensor of a camera with a charge-coupled device (CCD). Then, it is converted into data that a computer can reconstruct into the final image.
Although it is unlikely that ordinary citizens will see videos of balloons exploding at high speed captured by SCARF systems, researchers claim that capturing new ultrafast phenomena could help improve fields such as physics, biology, chemistry, materials science, and engineering.
