New Trillion-Frame-Per-Second Camera May Herald New Age of Scientific Discovery

It's a huge step forward for scientific photography. Researchers have developed a new high-speed camera that can record events at a rate of more than 1-trillion-frames-per second. That's more than a thousand times faster than conventional high-speed cameras, and could be huge for exploring complex ultrafast phenomena.

Conventional high-speed cameras are limited by the processing speed of their mechanical and electrical components. The new camera, called STAMP for Sequentially Timed All-optical Mapping Photography, gets around that issue by using only fast, optical components.

STAMP relies on a property of light called dispersion. This can be observed in the way a misty sky splits sunshine into a rainbow of colors. In a similar manner, STAMP splits an ultrashort pulse of light into a barrage of different colored flashes that hit the imaged object in rapid-fire succession. Each separate color flash can then be analyzed to string together a moving picture of what the object looked like over the time it took the dispersed light pulse to travel through the device.

While STAMP could be huge for future research, scientists are still improving the device. Currently, the team is constructing an improved STAMP system that can acquire 25 sequential images. Eventually, they could increase the number of frames with 100 with current technology.

"I think it is important to note that there might be many potential applications of STAMP that I have not imagined," said Keiichi Nakagawa, one of the researchers, in a news release. "I hope more researchers will become interesting in STAMP."

The findings are published in the journal Nature Photonics.

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