The world's fastest camera

A group of researchers presented in the journal Nature, the faster the camera designed to date. Its shutter speed is just one billionth of a second and is able to capture more than six million images a second in a row.

The lamp flash the camera is a fast laser pulse, detected electronically, which are dispersed in space and in time becomes longer. In addition, the camera operates with only one detector, instead of the millions who are in a typical digital camera.

This new approach will be critical in making images that occur at random or with rapid movements, such as communication between neurons.

The technique, called Steam (Serial Amplified Time-Encoded imaging), depends on careful handling of the laser pulses called "supercontinuo".

These pulses of less than one millionth of one millionth of a second term, contain a considerably wide range of colors. Two optical elements scatter the laser pulse in a two-dimensional ordered array of colors.

It is this "2D rainbow" which illuminates a sample. Part of the rainbow is reflected by the sample, depending on the areas of light and darkness of the illuminated area, and thinking back on his initial path.

Since the dispersion of different colors of the pulse is as regular and orderly, the color reflected contain detailed spatial information about the sample.

"The points clearly reflect its wavelength allocated, but not dark," said Bahram Jalali, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who led the research. "When the rainbow is reflected from a 2D object, the image is copied on the color spectrum of the pulse".

The pulse passes, then through the optical scattering and becomes, once again, a ray of light, with the image stored inside in the form of a range of colors distributed.

However, the spectrum of color is mixed in an exceptionally short pulse of light, it would be impossible to draw in traditional electronics.

The team runs, then beat to a so-called dispersion fiber, a fiber optic cable with a different speed limits for different colors of light. As a result, the red part of the spectrum is shifted ahead of the blue as the pulse advances through the fiber. Finally, the red and blue separated by just inside the fiber, reaching its end at different times.

Then, just detect the light out of the standard fiber with a photodiode and digitized by assigning parts of the pulse arriving at different times at different points in the two dimensional space.

The result of this process is an optical image that represents an image capture with a duration of only 440 trillionth of a second. The researchers used a laser shot over six million in a second pulse, giving rise to the same number of images. However, argue that the system can be improved in order to acquire more than 10 million images per second, ie more than 200,000 times faster than a standard video camera.