MIT: Capturing The Speed of Light

There is nothing that will escape this camera, not even light itself. Scientists at MIT have created a camera that can capture a video at a rate of a trillion-frame-per-second.

Media Lab postdoc Andreas Velten, one of the system’s developers, calls it the “ultimate” in slow motion: “There’s nothing in the universe that looks fast to this camera.” The system uses optical equipment that relies on a technology called a strak camera that costs $250,000. The aperture of the streak camera is a narrow slit. Particles of light (photons) enter the camera through the slit and are converted into electrons, which pass through an electric field that deflects them in a direction perpendicular to the slit. 

Because the electric field is changing very rapidly, it deflects the electrons corresponding to late-arriving photons more than it does those corresponding to early arriving ones. It takes only a nanosecond (a billionth of a second) for light to scatter through a bottle, but it takes about an hour to collect all the data necessary for the final video. For that reason, Raskar calls the new system “the world’s slowest fastest camera.” Check out the video.
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MIT: Capturing The Speed of Light

Andreas Velten is a Postdoctoral Associate in the group of Ramesh Raskar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He obtained his PhD in Physics at the University of New Mexico designing lasers for ultra sensitive phase measurements.