Swedish Researchers Develop 5 Trillion Images per Second Camera

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have announced that they now have the world’s fastest camera, able to capture rapidly occuring events that are just 0.2 trillionths of a second long or what is the equivalent of five trillion images per second. This allows the researchers to photograph things that were once impossible to capture such as reactions in biology, chemistry or physics. Scientists relying on models to recreate these events can now take advantage of this high-speed photography technology instead.

With current existing high-speed camera technology, images are captured in sequence one by one hence it is bottlenecked physically by the mechanics of the device. The method devised by the Lund University researchers however, captures several coded images in one photo and with the use of an innovative algorithm, sorts them into a video sequence afterwards. The idea was developed in order to gain better understanding with regards to certain processes that occur in nature that are in the scale of picoseconds or femtoseconds.

To demonstrate the new camera’s capability, the researchers have filmed how photons travel a distance corresponding to the thickness of paper. The process itself lasts for a picosecond, but the researchers were able to film it in video slowed down by a factor of trillion times.