A team of biomedical engineers from Washington University in St. Louis (USA) has created the fastest 2D camera in the world, managing to capture up to 100,000 million frames per second . This technological milestone has been collected by the journal Nature .
The technique used to create this next-generation device has been dubbed compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) and represents an incredible advance, as today’s fastest cameras did not exceed 10 million frames per second. With this camera, scientists have been able to record the reflection of a laser pulse, the circulation of photons through two different media, refraction and light propagation . “For the first time, humans can see pulses of light on the fly,” explains Lihong Wang, leader of the study.
The operation of the camera is simple: when the raw data has been recorded in the device, the images are processed by computers using a technology known as computational imaging or computational photography.
What are the possible applications of this innovative camera? Although it will not serve as a digital camera, it will be a great help as a key component of devices such as high-power telescopes or microscopes, to be able to capture both natural and dynamic physical phenomena. In astronomy, the camera would allow us to analyze the temporal activities of a distant supernova , for example. In biomedicine, the camera will be able to record cellular environmental conditions such as PH or oxygen pressure and the fluorescence of the molecules. In forensic medicine, this technology could be used to reproduce bullet paths . Possible uses of CUP technology could lead to new discoveries “that we can’t even anticipate yet,” says Wang.
