Researchers Design the World's Fastest Ultraviolet Camera
Phoenix666 writes:
Researchers design the world's fastest ultraviolet camera:
"Many phenomena that occur on very short time scales also take place on a very small spatial scale. To see them, you need to sense shorter wavelengths. Doing this in the UV or even X-ray ranges is a remarkable step toward this goal," says Jinyang Liang, who led the study.
To record in this new range of wavelengths and to develop the technique into a user-friendly product, researchers designed a compact UV-CUP [Ultra-Violet Compressed Ultrafast Photography] system with Christian Yves Cote of Axis Photonique Inc. via an academia-industry collaboration. The new system features a patterned photocathode, which is used to simultaneously detect and encode black light. "Like a standard camera, our technology is passive. It does not produce light; it receives it. Therefore, our photocathode had to be sensitive to the photons emitted as UV light. This design makes our technique a stand-alone system that can be easily integrated into various experimental platforms," says Jinyang Liang, who has been contributing to the development of CUP since his postdoctorate.
[...] With the innovations in both hardware and software, UV-CUP has an imaging speed of 0.5 trillion frames per second. It produces videos with 1500 frames in large format. As a light-speed imager, UV-CUP sees flying UV photons in real time. "It always fascinates me when you can watch the fastest object in the universe in such great detail," says Yingming Lai, a Master's student at INRS and the first author of the article.
Half a trillion frames per second is not bad, but it will probably be beat in a year or two by an iPhone.
[Hat tip to RandomFactor for also submitting this story through IRC.]
Journal Reference:
Yingming Lai, Yujia Xue, ChristianYves Cote, et al. SingleShot Ultraviolet Compressed Ultrafast Photography, Laser & Photonics Reviews (DOI: 10.1002/lpor.202000122)
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