At 1 Trillion Pics Per Second, This Camera Can Photograph Shock Waves & Other Invisible Things
Guy who built the world's fastest camera capable of capturing 10 trillion frames per second, has now built a specialized camera that can capture transparent and invisible phenomena at 1 trillion frames per second -- which the 10 trillion frames per second camera cannot capture.
Guy who built the world's fastest camera capable of capturing 10 trillion frames per second, has now built a specialized camera that can capture transparent and invisible phenomena at 1 trillion frames per second.
Caltech's Lihong Wang specifically built this new 1 trillion frames per second capturing camera for all the stuff the older 10 trillion frames per second camera couldn't capture.
A shockwave created by a laser striking water propagates in slow motion, as captured by a new ultrafast photography technology. Credit: Caltech
The breakthrough camera technology, which Lihong Wang is calling as phase-sensitive compressed ultrafast photography (pCUP), is not only capable of taking pictures of fully transparent objects but also of more ephemeral things like shockwaves and possibly even of the signals that travel through neurons, according to Phys.org.
By itself, phase-contrast microscopy was invented nearly 100 years ago by Dutch physicist Frits Zernike, which has been tweaked by Lihong Wang to work better at extremely high frame rates.
"What we've done is to adapt standard phase-contrast microscopy so that it provides very fast imaging, which allows us to image ultrafast phenomena in transparent materials," Wang mentions in a paper about the camera technology which appeared in the January 17 issue of the journal Science Advances.
A pulse of laser light travels through a crystal in slow motion. Credit: Caltech
Wang acknowledges that the technology is still early in its development and needs to be polished, but he's certain that it has applications in various fields, including physics, biology, or chemistry.
"As signals travel through neurons, there is a minute dilation of nerve fibers that we hope to see. If we have a network of neurons, maybe we can see their communication in real time," Wang says. In addition, he says, because temperature is known to change phase contrast, the system "may be able to image how a flame front spreads in a combustion chamber."
Wang isn't the only one breaking barriers, Chinese researchers have built a 4 trillion frames per second camera as well. Ultimately, it's amazing to imagine that an insanely fast camera is able to give us an up close and intimate insight into some of the most basic physics phenomena we've studied theoretically all this while, and the possibility of witnessing them in a practical way is no doubt exciting.
