Researchers have developed a new high-speed camera that can record events at a rate of more than 1-trillion-frames-per-second - over one thousand times faster than conventional high-speed cameras.
Called STAMP, for Sequentially Timed All-optical Mapping Photography, the new camera technology "holds great promise for studying a diverse range of previously unexplored complex ultrafast phenomena," said Keiichi Nakagawa, from the University of Tokyo, who worked to develop the camera with colleagues from an array of Japanese research institutions.
Conventional high-speed cameras are limited by the processing speed of their mechanical and electrical components. STAMP overcomes these limitations by using only fast, optical components.
Another optical imaging technique, called the pump-probe method, can create movies with an even higher frame rate than STAMP, but can only capture one frame at a time - limiting its use to processes that are exactly reproducible.
"Many physical and biological phenomena are difficult to reproduce. This inspired me to work on an ultrafast camera that could take multiple frames in a single shot," said Nakagawa.
STAMP relies on a property of light called dispersion that can be observed in the way a misty sky splits sunshine into a rainbow of colours.
Similarly, STAMP splits an ultrashort pulse of light into a barrage of different coloured flashes that hit the imaged object in rapid-fire succession.
Each separate colour flash can then be analysed to string together a moving picture of what the object looked like over the time it took the dispersed light pulse to travel through the device.
In the first iteration of STAMP, which was described in a paper published in Nature Photonics, the number of frames that the camera could take in a single shot was limited to six.
Currently, the team is constructing an improved STAMP system that can acquire 25 sequential images. Nakagawa believes the number of frames could eventually be increased to 100 with current technology.
Nakagawa notes that because STAMP operates on the assumption that all the differently coloured daughter pulses interact with the imaged object in the same way, the camera should not be used to image samples whose optical properties change over the range of wavelengths STAMP uses.
Even given STAMP's limitations, the technology has enormous potential, Nakagawa said.
His team has already used it with image electronic motion and lattice vibrations in a crystal of lithium niobate and to observe how a laser focused onto a glass plate creates a hot, rapidly expanding plume of plasma.
