Femtophotagrophy: World’s fastest camera shoots at 156.3 trillion frames per second called SCARF

Wow! Mind boggling!

"... The new camera can reportedly capture events that occur in the realm of femtoseconds ...

The researchers built on technology they developed as far back as 2014, known as compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) which could capture a now paltry-seeming 100 billion fps. The next stage was called T-CUP, with the T standing for “Trillion-frame-per-second” – which was, true to its word, capable of up to 10 trillion fps. And then in 2020, the team bumped it up to 70 trillion fps with a version called compressed ultrafast spectral photography (CUSP). ..."

"... this approach can only be applied to inert samples or to phenomena that happen the exact same way each time .. “For example, phenomena such as femtosecond laser ablation, shock-wave interaction with living cells, and optical chaos cannot be studied this way,” ... SCARF makes it possible to observe unique phenomena that are ultrafast, non-repeatable, or difficult to reproduce, such as shock wave mechanics in living cells or matter. These advances could potentially be used to develop better pharmaceutics and medical treatments. ..."

From the abstract:

"Single-shot real-time femtophotography is indispensable for imaging ultrafast dynamics during their times of occurrence. Despite their advantages over conventional multi-shot approaches, existing techniques confront restricted imaging speed or degraded data quality by the deployed optoelectronic devices and face challenges in the application scope and acquisition accuracy. They are also hindered by the limitations in the acquirable information imposed by the sensing models. Here, we overcome these challenges by developing swept coded aperture real-time femtophotography (SCARF). This computational imaging modality enables all-optical ultrafast sweeping of a static coded aperture during the recording of an ultrafast event, bringing full-sequence encoding of up to 156.3 THz to every pixel on a CCD camera. We demonstrate SCARF’s single-shot ultrafast imaging ability at tunable frame rates and spatial scales in both reflection and transmission modes. Using SCARF, we image ultrafast absorption in a semiconductor and ultrafast demagnetization of a metal alloy."

World’s fastest camera shoots at 156.3 trillion frames per second Engineers at INRS Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications Research Centre in Canada have developed the world’s fastest camera, which can shoot at an astonishing 156.3 trillion frames per second (fps).

Pushing back the limits of optical imaging by processing trillions of frames per second (original news release) Professor Jinyang Liang’s team is advancing in imaging speed with a new ultrafast camera system.

Swept coded aperture real-time femtophotography (open access)

The researcher sitting in front their camera