Ultrafast camera films 3-D movies at 100 billion frames per second


Date:
October 16, 2020
Source:
California Institute of Technology
Summary:
New camera technology captures ultrafast video in three dimensions
and may help solve some scientific mysteries.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
In his quest to bring ever-faster cameras to the world, Caltech's Lihong
Wang has developed technology that can reach blistering speeds of 70
trillion frames per second, fast enough to see light travel. Just like
the camera in your cell phone, though, it can only produce flat images.


==========================================================================
Now, Wang's lab has gone a step further to create a camera that not
only records video at incredibly fast speeds but does so in three
dimensions. Wang, Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering in the Andrew and Peggy Cherng Department of Medical
Engineering, describes the device in a new paper in the journal Nature Communications.

The new camera, which uses the same underlying technology as Wang's other compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) cameras, is capable of taking up
to 100 billion frames per second. That is fast enough to take 10 billion pictures, more images than the entire human population of the world,
in the time it takes you to blink your eye.

Wang calls the new iteration "single-shot stereo-polarimetric compressed ultrafast photography," or SP-CUP.

In CUP technology, all of the frames of a video are captured in one
action without repeating the event. This makes a CUP camera extremely
quick (a good cell-phone camera can take 60 frames per second). Wang
added a third dimension to this ultrafast imagery by making the camera
"see" more like humans do.

When a person looks at the world around them, they perceive that some
objects are closer to them, and some objects are farther away. Such depth perception is possible because of our two eyes, each of which observes
objects and their surroundings from a slightly different angle. The
information from these two images is combined by the brain into a single
3-D image.



==========================================================================
The SP-CUP camera works in essentially the same way, Wang says.

"The camera is stereo now," he says. "We have one lens, but it functions
as two halves that provide two views with an offset. Two channels mimic
our eyes." Just as our brain does with the signals it receives from
our eyes, the computer that runs the SP-CUP camera processes data from
these two channels into one three-dimensional movie.

SP-CUP also features another innovation that no human possesses: the
ability to see the polarization of light waves.

The polarization of light refers to the direction in which light waves
vibrate as they travel. Consider a guitar string. If the string is
pulled upwards (say, by a finger) and then released, the string will
vibrate vertically. If the finger plucks it sideways, the string will
vibrate horizontally. Ordinary light has waves that vibrate in all
directions. Polarized light, however, has been altered so that its waves
all vibrate in the same direction. This can occur through natural means,
such as when light reflects off a surface, or as a result of artificial manipulation, as happens with polarizing filters.

Though our eyes cannot detect the polarization of light directly,
the phenomenon has been exploited in a range of applications: from
LCD screens to polarized sunglasses and camera lenses in optics to
devices that detect hidden stress in materials and the three-dimensional configurations of molecules.

Wang says that the SP-CUP's combination of high-speed three-dimensional
imagery and the use of polarization information makes it a powerful
tool that may be applicable to a wide variety of scientific problems. In particular, he hopes that it will help researchers better understand the physics of sonoluminescence, a phenomenon in which sound waves create
tiny bubbles in water or other liquids. As the bubbles rapidly collapse
after their formation, they emit a burst of light.

"Some people consider this one of that greatest mysteries in physics,"
he says.

"When a bubble collapses, its interior reaches such a high temperature
that it generates light. The process that makes this happen is very
mysterious because it all happens so fast, and we're wondering if our
camera can help us figure it out." Funding for the research was provided
by the National Institutes of Health.


========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by
California_Institute_of_Technology. Original written by Emily
Velasco. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Jinyang Liang, Peng Wang, Liren Zhu, Lihong V. Wang. Single-shot
stereo-
polarimetric compressed ultrafast photography for light-speed
observation of high-dimensional optical transients with
picosecond resolution. Nature Communications, 2020; 11 (1) DOI:
10.1038/s41467-020-19065-5 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201016090201.htm

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