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posted by janrinok on Friday January 24 2020, @01:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the smile-ple....-too-late! dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A little over a year ago, Caltech's Lihong Wang developed the world's fastest camera, a device capable of taking 10 trillion pictures per second. It is so fast that it can even capture light traveling in slow motion.

But sometimes just being quick is not enough. Indeed, not even the fastest camera can take pictures of things it cannot see. To that end, Wang, Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering, has developed a new camera that can take up to 1 trillion pictures per second of transparent objects. A paper about the camera appears in the January 17 issue of the journal Science Advances.

The camera technology, which Wang calls phase-sensitive compressed ultrafast photography (pCUP), can take video not just of transparent objects but also of more ephemeral things like shockwaves and possibly even of the signals that travel through neurons.

Wang explains that his new imaging system combines the high-speed photography system he previously developed with an old technology, phase-contrast microscopy, that was designed to allow better imaging of objects that are mostly transparent such as cells, which are mostly water.

Phase-contrast microscopy, invented nearly 100 years ago by Dutch physicist Frits Zernike, works by taking advantage of the way that light waves slow down and speed up as they enter different materials. For example, if a beam of light passes through a piece of glass, it will slow down as it enters the glass and then speed up again as it exits. Those changes in speed alter the timing of the waves. With the use of some optical tricks it is possible to distinguish light that passed through the glass from light that did not, and the glass, though transparent, becomes much easier to see.

-- submitted from IRC

Journal Reference:

Taewoo Kim, Jinyang Liang, Liren Zhu, Lihong V. Wang. Picosecond-resolution phase-sensitive imaging of transparent objects in a single shot. Science Advances, 2020; 6 (3): eaay6200 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aay6200


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 24 2020, @02:56AM (2 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday January 24 2020, @02:56AM (#947792)

    And you thought that 120fps @ 4K needed an expensive flash card....

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  • (Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Friday January 24 2020, @03:13AM (1 child)

    by Coward, Anonymous (7017) on Friday January 24 2020, @03:13AM (#947812) Journal

    According to the paper, it can capture 350 frames at a time. It doesn't run continuously. The resolution is 72 x 512.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 24 2020, @03:02PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday January 24 2020, @03:02PM (#947951)

      350x72x512 = 13 million pixels that need to be captured basically instantly, in parallel. I wouldn't be surprised if the imaging sensor is arranged as a 25200x512 rectangle that captures and holds all the images.

      350 Trillionths of a second is a pretty short time window, it's gonna need a really good trigger to capture the interesting frames.

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