World’s Fastest Camera Shoots at 4.4 Trillion Frames Per Second

Researchers from the Keio University and the University of Tokyo in Japan have jointly developed the world’s fastest camera that is able to capture consecutive shots with a frame interval of 4.4 trillion frames per second. It is thousand times faster than conventional high speed cameras which can capture an image every one-billionth of a second. Apart from the mind boggling frame-rate, the Sequentially Timed All-optical Mapping Photography (STAMP) camera has a high pixel resolution of 450 × 450 pixels. In order to understand the working of STAMP camera you need to first see how a conventional high speed camera works. A conventional high speed camera works on the pump-probe process where a pulse of light is initiated (pumped) at the object and then captured (probed). The drawback of this process is that it requires repetitive measurements to construct an image and during these measurements it often misses in probing non-repetitive events such as chemical reactions.

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The STAMP motion picture camera made by the Japanese researchers uses the method of femtophotography to capture images in a single burst without the need of repetitive measurements. Femtophotography involves optical mapping of the target's time-varying spatial profile onto a burst stream of sequentially timed photographs with spatial and temporal dispersion. The researchers have already captured plasma dynamics and lattice vibration waves and hope that their camera will be put to use to study fast dynamics in photochemistry, spintronics , phononics, fluidics and plasma physics. Before launching the camera to the public the team is working on shrinking its size as currently is measures about a square meter.