A new camera capturing light at a trillion frames per second

Light is an astonishing phenomenon that has been the center of thousands of studies for a long time. Now, thanks to a MIT research team, we have a great opportunity to better understand it and see its properties with our bare eyes.

A photograph of the super fast camera.

The team designed a camera that is capable of filming light as fast as it travels. It converts nearly a one Nanosecond into 20 seconds of filming. You will now be able to watch light in an incredibly slow motion that no one could ever dream of.

« We have built an imaging solution that allows us to visualize propagation of light. The effective exposure time of each frame is two trillionths of a second and the resultant visualization depicts the movement of light at roughly half a trillion frames per second. Direct recording of reflected or scattered light at such a frame rate with sufficient brightness is nearly impossible. We use an indirect ‘stroboscopic’ method that records millions of repeated measurements by careful scanning in time and viewpoints. Then we rearrange the data to create a ‘movie’ of a nanosecond long even. »

The camera uses a system of mirrors, a periodic emission of a laser beam and an ultra-high speed camera. The invention shoots 2 trillion frames per second, capturing photos of the laser beam in precise moments of several laser beams. This results in an exact simulation of the propagation of one single beam of light.

This technology can give people a better understanding of the ultrafast process and a greater, better power of image processing and 3D simulation.

Watch the video below, to see how ingenious and astonishing, the results, are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch4FoeKXQCI

Here is the official website of the research team, check it out for more informations :

Lien vers le site.