Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
Researchers from the University of Tokyo and colleagues from institutions throughout Japan and the US have created a new high-speed camera capable of recording events more than 1,000-times faster than their conventional counterparts.
The device is known as STAMP (Sequentially Timed All-optical Mapping Photography), and according to Phys.org, it is capable of capturing more than one-trillion-frames-per-second, overcoming the mechanical and electrical limitations of traditional cameras by exclusively using fast optical components to increase its processing speed.
STAMP “holds great promise for studying a diverse range of previously unexplored complex ultrafast phenomena,” Keiichi Nakagawa, a research fellow at the University of Tokyo, who was involved in the camera’s development, explained to the website on Wednesday.
“Many physical and biological phenomena are difficult to reproduce. This inspired me to work on an ultrafast camera that could take multiple frames in a single shot,” he added, referring to the pump-probe method, which is an optical imaging technique that can create movies with a frame rate higher than STAMP’s, but can only do so one frame at a time.
STAMP could eventually image ultrafast phenomena
While pursuing his master’s degree, Nakagawa found himself in the need of a camera like STAMP to see how acoustic shock waves changed living cells. Scientists believed that mechanical stress caused by such waves could increase bone and blood vessel growth, but they had no tools capable of capturing a shock wave passing through a cell.
“Since there was no suitable technique,” Nakagawa told Phys.org, “I decided to develop a new high-speed imaging technique in my doctoral program.” Originally described in an August 2014 edition of the journal Nature Photonics, his device uses light dispersion and splits ultrashort light pulses into different colored flashes that rapidly pummel the object being imaged.
The researchers can then analyze each of those individual color flashes and combine them to create a moving image of what the object looked like over the time it took the dispersed light pulse to travel through the device, the website explained. During the 2014 prototype, STAMP was only able to take six frames in a single shot, but its performance has improved dramatically.
Nakagawa explained that he and his colleagues are looking for further improve their device so that it will be able to acquire 25 sequential images, and that they believe that with the technology that is currently available, the number of frames could eventually be increased to 100.
It has already been used to image electronic motion and lattice vibrations in a lithium niobate crystal, as well as how a hot, rapidly expanding plasma plume was formed using a laser focused on a glass plate, Phys.org said. The developers believe that STAMP could ultimately be used to observe several different types of ultrafast phenomena for the first time.
—–
Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram and Pinterest.
Comments