Technology

World’s fastest camera shoots at 156.3 trillion frames per second

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The new camera can reportedly capture events that occur in the realm of femtoseconds
The new camera can reportedly capture events that occur in the realm of femtoseconds
An illustration of SCARF, the world's fastest camera. A chirped pulse of light captures an ultrafast event – an apple being pierced with a bullet – before entering the system for processing into an image
INRS
The SCARF system, the world's fastest camera, in the lab
INRS
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Engineers at INRS Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications Research Centre in Canada have developed the world’s fastest camera, which can shoot at an astonishing 156.3 trillion frames per second (fps).

The best slow-mo cameras in phones are usually working with a few hundred fps. Professional cinematic cameras might use a few thousand, to achieve a smoother effect. But if you want to see what’s going on at the nanoscale, you’ll need to slow things way down, to the billions or even trillions of frames per second.

The new camera can reportedly capture events that occur in the realm of femtoseconds – quadrillionths of a second. For reference, there’s about as many of those in one second as there are seconds in 32 million years.

The researchers built on technology they developed as far back as 2014, known as compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) which could capture a now paltry-seeming 100 billion fps. The next stage was called T-CUP, with the T standing for “Trillion-frame-per-second” – which was, true to its word, capable of up to 10 trillion fps. And then in 2020, the team bumped it up to 70 trillion fps with a version called compressed ultrafast spectral photography (CUSP).

Now, the researchers have more than doubled it again, to a mind-boggling 156.3 trillion frames per second. The new camera system is called “swept-coded aperture real-time femtophotography” (SCARF), which can capture events that happen too fast for even the previous versions of the tech to see. That includes things like shock waves moving through matter or living cells.

The SCARF system, the world's fastest camera, in the lab
INRS

SCARF works by first firing off a “chirped” ultrashort pulse of laser light, which passes through the event or object being imaged. If you picture the light as a rainbow, the red wavelengths will capture the event first, followed by orange, yellow, and down the spectrum to violet. Because the event is happening so quickly, by the time each successive “color” reaches it, it looks different, allowing the pulse to capture the whole thing changing over an incredibly short period of time.

This light pulse is then run through a gauntlet of components that focus, reflect, diffract and encode it, until it finally reaches the sensor of a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera. This then converts into data that can be reconstructed by a computer into the final image.

While it’s unlikely us regular Joes will be watching high-speed videos of balloons popping that have been captured by SCARF systems, the researchers say capturing new ultrafast phenomena could help improve fields like physics, biology, chemistry, materials science and engineering.

The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.

Source: INRS

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8 comments
Tristan P
Wow, that's a startling speed!
windykites
How do you watch a video at this frame rate? The difference between each frame would be totally un-noticeable. How much data storage required?
paul314
At this rate, a million frames (more than in a typical feature film) would cover an interval of less than 7 billionths of a second. So watching a computer fetch a byte of data from RAM could take an entire day.
Douglas Rogers
This might be good for looking at the burn wave in the laser fusion pellet.
Cymon Curcumin
“researchers say capturing new ultrafast phenomena could help improve fields like physics, biology, chemistry, materials science and engineering.”

I suspect that is so but I an having a hard time imagining what these improvements would be over current high-speed video. I guess I will have to wait and see.

Troublesh00ter
My question is simple: what's the practical application, if there is one?
Pedro R
Ok, but thar doesn't mean nothing if you don't say the resolution. It can reach a trillion fps, but its capturing a 10x10 video
Ranscapture
@Pedro, even at 10x10 res, that’s enough for them to learn so much, because the size of the things they’re measuring as so small.