Canadian engineer creates the fastest camera in the world

Engineers at the INRS Énergie Matériaux Telecommunications Research Center developed the world's fastest camera, which can shoot at 156.3 trillion frames per second (fps).

The best slow-motion cameras on phones usually operate at a few hundred fps. Professional video cameras can use speeds of several thousand fps to achieve smoother effects. But if they want to observe what happens at the nanoscale, researchers need shutter speeds of billions or even trillions of fps. The new camera from the engineering team at INRS can capture events that occur in a few femtoseconds (one femtosecond is one millionth billionth of a second), according to New Atlas.

Simulate the world's fastest camera system SCARF. (Photo: INRS).

The research team relied on technology they developed in 2014, called CUP (Compressed Ultrafast Photography) , which can capture 100 billion fps. The next stage is called T-CUP , where T refers to "trillion frames per second" . As the name suggests, T-CUP can capture up to 10 trillion fps. In 2020, researchers increased it to 70 trillion fps with a version called ultrafast spectral compression (CUSP).

Now, they have doubled the speed to 156.3 trillion fps. The new camera system, called "scanning coded aperture real-time femto imaging" (SCARF), can capture events that happen too quickly for previous versions of the technology to observe, such as shock waves transmitted through living matter or cells.

SCARF works by firing an ultra-short pulse of laser light, which passes through the event or object that needs to be photographed. If photographing light such as a rainbow, the red wavelength will record the event first, followed by orange, yellow, and finally purple. Because the event happens so quickly, as each color passes in turn, the image appears different, allowing the laser light pulse to record the entire change in an extremely short time. This light pulse then passes through a series of components that focus, reflect, diffract and encode it, until it reaches the sensor of a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera, where it is converted into data. data that a computer can reconstruct into the final image.

According to the research team, their camera system will help improve fields such as geography, biology, chemistry, materials science and engineering. They describe the device in detail in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications.