World's New Fastest 2D Camera Captures 100 Billion Frames Per Second

Engineers have officially created the world's fastest 2D camera to date. They've developed a device that can capture events at a staggering 100 billion frames per second, which is orders of magnitude faster than any currently receive-only ultrafast imaging techniques.

Other receive-only ultrafast imaging techniques are limited by on-chip storage and electronic readout speed to operations of about 10 million frames per second. In this case, though, the engineers employed another technique, called compressed ultrafast technology (CUP). This allowed the researchers to create movies of the images they took with single laser shots of four physical phenomena: laser pulse reflection, refraction, faster-than light propagation of what is called non-information and photon racing in two media.

"For the first time, humans can see light pulses on the fly," said Lihong Wang, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Because this technique advances the imaging frame rate by orders of magnitude, we now enter a new regime to open up new visions. Each new technique, especially one of a quantum leap forward, is always followed a number of new discoveries. It's our hope that CUP will enable new discoveries in science-ones that we can't even anticipate yet."

So how does this camera work? It's actually a series of devices envisioned to work with high-powered microscopes and telescopes to capture dynamic natural and physical phenomena. Once the raw data are acquired, the actual images are formed on a personal computer. This technology, in particular, is known as computational imaging.

"This is an exciting advance and the type of groundbreaking work that these high-risk NIH awards are designed to support," said Richard Conroy, program director of optical imaging at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. "These ultrafast cameras have the potential to greatly enhance our understanding of very fast biological interactions and chemical processes and allow us to build better models of complex, dynamical systems."

The findings could be huge in terms of understanding how certain processes take place. This, in turn, could pave the way for future discoveries.

The findings are published in the journal Nature.

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