MIT develops camera fast enough to see light in motion

[Lunican]

Trillion-frame-per-second video
By using optical equipment in a totally unexpected way, MIT researchers have created an imaging system that makes light look slow.

MIT researchers have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion exposures per second. That’s fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of a burst of light traveling the length of a one-liter bottle, bouncing off the cap and reflecting back to the bottle’s bottom.

Media Lab postdoc Andreas Velten, one of the system’s developers, calls it the “ultimate” in slow motion: “There’s nothing in the universe that looks fast to this camera,” he says.

http://www.youtube.com/v/EtsXgODHMWk?version=3&hl=en_US

The system relies on a recent technology called a streak camera, deployed in a totally unexpected way. The aperture of the streak camera is a narrow slit. Particles of light â€" photons â€" enter the camera through the slit and pass through an electric field that deflects them in a direction perpendicular to the slit. Because the electric field is changing very rapidly, it deflects late-arriving photons more than it does early-arriving ones.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/trillion-fps-camera-1213.html

http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/

[JeffreyS]

The video is great.