Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have developed the world’s fastest two dimensional camera. This device can capture images at a rate of 100 billion frames per second. By using a method known as compressed ultrafast photography (CUP), this group has demonstrated the potential of this new technology for science by imaging laser pulse reflections, refraction, and a photon racing in two media. According to Dr. Lihong Wang, PhD, the project lead, humans will now be able to visualize light pulses. An immediate biomedical application is visualizing excitation of light towards fluorescent molecules and then tracking the conversion from green to red fluorescence. Researchers would then be able to use this data to assess the corresponding fluorescence lifetimes which can be used to identify diseases or reveal environmental conditions like pH or oxygen pressure on a cellular level. Scientists are now able to image the lifetime of flurophores at light speed!
This device uses a special camera lens that takes photons into a small mechanism called a digital micromirror device which has around 1 million mirror components. The micromirrors then encode the image and reflect light into a beam splitter. The photons are shot to a device called a streak camera, and the photons are changed into electrons, which are sheared by electrodes. Ultimately, a charge-coupled device stores when and where each of the electrons land after a voltage is applied. This entire process happens in only 5 nanoseconds. Dr. Wang has even stated that this technology can be used in other scientific disciplines such as astronomy. For example, scientists could combine this imaging method with the Hubble telescope to discover new phenomena. The advancement in this imaging technology can open doors to visualizing all sorts of phenomena in the scientific world that researchers might not expect because the tools to do so did not exist until now.
Study in Nature: Single-shot compressed ultrafast photography at one hundred billion frames per second…
Washington University in St. Louis Press Release: World’s Fastest 2-D Camera May Enable New Scientific Discoveries…
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