Innovation - World Fastest 2D Camera With 100 Billion Frame Per Second

We live in a world were speed is every thing. The fastest are never enough as we crave for more speed. Such could be said of the world newest invention in the world of cameras. A device that can capture events up to 100 billion frames per second. Those photographers that have been pursuing the capture of transient scenes at a high imaging speed for centuries,now have the world's fastest receive-only 2-D camera that can capture events up to 100 billion frames per second.

A team of biomedical engineers at Washington University in St. Louis, led by Lihong Wang, PhD, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, has developed the world's fastest receive-only 2-D camera,

That's orders of magnitude faster than any current receive-only ultrafast imaging techniques, which are limited by on-chip storage and electronic readout speed to operations of about 10 million frames per second.
Using the Washington University technique, called compressed ultrafast photography (CUP), Wang and his colleagues have made movies of the images they took with single laser shots of four physical phenomena: laser pulse reflection, refraction, faster-than light propagation of what is called non-information, and photon racing in two media. While it's no day at the races, the images are entertaining, awe-inspiring and represent the opening of new vistas of scientific exploration.

"For the first time, humans can see light pulses on the fly," Wang says. "Because this technique advances the imaging frame rate by orders of magnitude, we now enter a new regime to open up new visions. Each new technique, especially one of a quantum leap forward, is always followed a number of new discoveries. It's our hope that CUP will enable new discoveries in science -- ones that we can't even anticipate yet."

This camera doesn't look like a Kodak or Cannon; rather, it is a series of devices envisioned to work with high-powered microscopes and telescopes to capture dynamic natural and physical phenomena. Once the raw data are acquired, the actual images are formed on a personal computer; the technology is known as computational imaging.

The development of the technology was funded by two grants from the National Institutes of Health that support pioneering and potentially transformative approaches to major challenges in biomedical research.

An immediate application is in biomedicine. One of the movies shows a green excitation light pulsing toward fluorescent molecules on the right where the green converts to red, which is the fluorescence. By tracking this, the researchers can get a single shot assessment of the fluorescence lifetime, which can be used to detect diseases or reflect cellular environmental conditions like pH or oxygen pressure.

The research appears in the Dec. 4, 2014, issue of Nature. 

Continue Reading>>                                                                                                               sciencedaily