Studying Chaos with One of the World's Fastest Cameras
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Studying chaos with one of the world's fastest cameras:
[...] chaotic systems [...] are notable for exhibiting behavior that is predictable at first, but grows increasingly random with time.
[...] In the latest issue of Science Advances, [Caltech's Lihong] Wang describes how he has used an ultrafast camera of his own design that recorded video at one billion frames per second to observe the movement of laser light in a chamber specially designed to induce chaotic reflections.
"Some cavities are non-chaotic, so the path the light takes is predictable," Wang says. But in the current work, he and his colleagues have used that ultrafast camera as a tool to study a chaotic cavity, "in which the light takes a different path every time we repeat the experiment."
The camera makes use of a technology called compressed ultrafast photography (CUP), which Wang has demonstrated in other research to be capable of speeds as fast as 70 trillion frames per second. The speed at which a CUP camera takes video makes it capable of seeing light-the fastest thing in the universe-as it travels.
But CUP cameras have another feature that make them uniquely suited for studying chaotic systems. Unlike a traditional camera that shoots one frame of video at a time, a CUP camera essentially shoots all of its frames at once. This allows the camera to capture the entirety of a laser beam's chaotic path through the chamber all in one go.
Journal Reference:
Linran Fan, Xiaodong Yan, Han Wang, et al. Real-time observation and control of optical chaos [open], Science Advances (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abc8448)
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