Scientists have invented a camera that can capture 156,3 trillion frames per second and is now the fastest camera in the world.
A high-end camera can shoot over 100 frames per second (FPS), but that pales in comparison to the camera system researchers in Canada have built that 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.
Instead, the Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications team 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) and 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.
SCARF works by first firing an ultra-short pulse of laser light, which passes through the event or object being imaged. If we imagine light as a rainbow, the red wavelengths will record 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.
