The worlds fastest camera can shoot at 156.3 trillion frames per second (fps)

Engineers at the INRS Énergie Matériaux Telecommunication Research Center have developed a camera that can capture images at 156.3 trillion frames per second (fps), the world's fastest camera for capturing events that occur in a few femtoseconds (a femtosecond is one millionth of a billionth of a second).

To put that into perspective, the best slow-motion cameras on phones typically operate at a few hundred fps, while professional video cameras operate at a few thousand fps.

The team relied on a technology called Compressed Ultrafast Photography (CUP), which can capture 100 billion fps, which they developed in 2014. They then developed a technology called T-CUP, where T stands for "trillion frames per second", which can capture up to 10 trillion fps. In 2020, a version called Compressed Ultrafast Spectral Photography (CUSP) can capture up to 70 trillion fps. And now, the researchers have doubled the speed to 156.3 trillion fps.

The new camera system is called "scanning-aperture-coded real-time femtosecond imaging" (SCARF).

SCARF works by firing an ultra-short pulse of laser light, which passes through the object or event to be photographed.

If you photograph a rainbow, the camera will first record the red wavelength, followed by orange, yellow, and finally violet. A laser pulse records the changes as each color passes through in turn in a very short period of time. The pulse then passes through a series of components that focus, reflect, diffract, and encode it, and finally converts it into data that a computer can reconstruct into the final image when it reaches the sensor of a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera.

According to the team, their camera system can capture events that happen too quickly for previous versions of the technology to observe, such as shock waves traveling through matter or living cells, which could help improve fields such as geography, biology, chemistry, materials science and engineering. The device is detailed in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

https://newatlas.com/technology/scarf-worlds-fastest-camera-156-3-trillion-frames-per-second/