Researchers at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and a research-oriented branch of the University of Quebec have used ultra-short laser pulses to invent world’s fastest camera. This camera is capable of taking a mind-blowing 10 trillion shots per second.
A tightly focused laser beam is visible to the human eye but filming a laser pulse moving through air is too fast for the human eye to pick on.
But this camera can even capture these beams of light in Slo-Mo
Known as T-CUP, this astonishing device is built on a technology called compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) can lock down an impressive ten trillion frames per second. In comparison, your average movie camera takes a mere 24 frames per second.
Compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) technology can lock down a remarkable 100 billion frames per second, but by simultaneously recording a static image and performing some tricky math, the researchers were able to reconstruct 10 trillion frames.
The researchers have not explained what the “T” stands for in T-CUP but it could be ‘trillion’ most likely.
An improvement of an earlier 4.4-trillion fps system
The incredible Speed of the camera doubles the speed record set in 2015 by a camera that took a mind-boggling 4.4 trillion frames per second (FPS).
Researchers hope that the camera will be useful in biomedical and materials research.
“It’s an achievement in itself,” said former COIL engineer Jinyang Liang, leading author of the work “But we already see possibilities for increasing the speed to one quadrillion (10 exp 15) frames per second!”
