WASHINGTON – A research team at MIT has created a ultra-fast imaging camera that is able to capture moving pieces of light by capturing images at a trillion frames per second.
Ramesh Raskar and his team tell the The New York Times that “femto photography” allows researchers to capture light moving in slow motion, instead of relying strictly on data that has been used to previously measure light’s behavior.
Dr. Raskar enlisted colleagues from the chemistry department to modify a “streak tube,” a supersensitive piece of laboratory equipment that scans and captures light. Streak tubes are generally used to intensify streams of photons into streams of electrons. They are fast enough to record the progress of packets of laser light fired repeatedly into a bottle filled with a cloudy fluid.
The streak tube scans and captures light in much the same way a cathode ray tube emits and paints an image on the inside of a computer monitor. Each horizontal line is exposed for just 1.71 picoseconds, or trillionths of a second, Dr. Raskar said – enough time for the laser beam to travel less than half a millimeter through the fluid inside the bottle.
MIT has posted a video of Raskar demonstrating how the camera is used:
Raskar believes the technology could be used in the future for everything from medical technology to determining the ripeness of fruit.
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