Scientists have invented a camera that can capture 156,3 trillionmillions frames per second and is now billed as the fastest camera in the world.
A high-end camera can shoot over 100 frames per second (FPS), but it pales in comparison to their built-in camera system researchers in Canada and which can shoot up to 156,3 trillion FPS.
The camera is called SCARF, short for Swept-Coded Aperture Real-time Femtophotography. It was built for labs studying micro-events (events that happen too quickly for existing sensors). For example, SCARF has recorded extremely fast events such as shock waves moving through matter or the demagnetization of a metal alloy.
SCARF differs from previous high-speed camera systems that took individual frames, one by one, and then made a movie of them to recreate what had been done.
On the contrary, the team of Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications at the Research Center National de la Recherche scientifique (INRS) in Quebec, Canada, used a passive femtosecond imager, which can and does work with the T-CUP (Trillion-frame-per-second compressed ultrafast photography) system and it can capture trillions of frames per second.
The research was led by Professor Jinyang Liang, a pioneer in ultrafast imaging, whose 2018 discovery was the basis for his latest work.
Το SCARF λειτουργεί εκτοξεύοντας πρώτα έναν υπερβραχύ παλμό φωτός λέιζερ, ο οποίος διέρχεται μέσα από το συμβάν ή το αντικείμενο που απεικονίζεται. Αν φανταστούμε το light as a rainbow, red wavelengths will register the event first, followed by orange, yellow, and the entire spectrum to violet. Because the event happens so quickly, by the time each successive "color" arrives, it looks different, allowing the pulse to record the entire event changing in an incredibly short amount of time.
The research is published in Nature and you can read it here.
