Lasers Just Gave us the World’s Fastest Camera

The device has been dubbed T-Cup and is capable of capturing images at over 10 trillion frames a second! “T-Cup” Was developed Jinyang Liang along with Caltech’s Lihong Wang and their colleagues.  If the device you are reading this on happens to be a smart phone,  you could capture about 30 frames per second. “T-Cup” is so fast that it can film light in slow motion.

This new camera literally makes it possible to freeze time to see phenomena – and even light – in extremely slow motion. Although some measurements are possible, nothing beats a clear image.

~ Jinyang Liang

They had an established process known as compressed ultrafast photography to use as a starting point…

We knew by using only a femtosecond streak camera, the image quality would be limited. So to improve this, we added another camera that acquires a static image. Combined with the image acquired by the femtosecond streak camera, we can use what is called a Radon transformation to obtain high-quality images while recording ten trillion frames per second.

~ Lihong Wang

The process used here could have huge implications for medical and scientific research. You can read more about T-Cup at INRS.