World’s fastest camera captures 70 trillion frames per second
Using ultrafast laser pulses, a new camera system can shoot at up to 70 trillion frames per second, Via New Atlas!
The best phone cameras can record slow motion with under 1,000 frames per second. Commercial rigs generally shoot with several thousand. But that all absolutely pales in comparison to the new record holder for the world’s fastest camera, boasting a mind-boggling rate of 70 trillion frames per second. That’s fast enough to capture light waves in movement.
Developed at Caltech, the technology is called compressed ultrafast spectral photography (CUSP). As you might expect from the incredible frame rate, it doesn’t function like any ordinary camera. It uses extremely short pulses of laser light, each one lasting just one femtosecond. For reference, that’s one quadrillionth of a second.
A system of optics splits up these pulses into even shorter flashes. Each of these pulses then strikes a specialized sensor in the camera, producing an image. And that happens 70 trillion times a second.
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