Visualizing Light over a Fruit with a Trillion FPS Camera, Camera Culture Group, Bawendi Lab, MIT

Video of a fruit illuminated by a femtosecond laser pulse and captured at an effective trillion frames per second. Light moves less than 1 mm per frame.

We have built an imaging solution that allows us to visualize propagation of light at an effective rate of one trillion frames per second. Direct recording of light at such a frame rate with sufficient brightness is nearly impossible. We use an indirect 'stroboscopic' method that combines millions of repeated measurements by careful scanning in time and viewpoints.

The device has been developed by the MIT Media Lab's Camera Culture group in collaboration with Bawendi Lab in the Department of Chemistry at MIT. A laser pulse that lasts less than one trillionth of a second is used as a flash and the light returning from the scene is collected by a camera at a rate equivalent to roughly 1 trillion frames per second. However, due to very short exposure times (roughly one trillionth of a second) and a narrow field of view of the camera, the video is captured over several minutes by repeated and periodic sampling.

For more info visit

http://raskar.info/trillionfps
http://femtophoto.info

Music: "Rising" by Kevin MacLeod (http://music.incompetech.com/royaltyf...).

http://raskar.info/trillionfps
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/sci...
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/tr...
http://cornar.info
http://www.slideshare.net/cameracultu...

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Leon Elliott]

The 2737299th frame was certainly the best. It conveyed such beautiful emotion...

[Matthew Wilson]

I would love to see this done on the two slot experiment. It would be amazing to have a visual display of both light and, somehow, fast moving particles up to the size of buckyballs traveling through crystal slots at 1 trillion FPS. I guess this could be considered a visual representation or approximation of 1 trillion FPS. Though not recording 1 trillion fps in the same manner as 60fps, it has application and merit in my book.

[BAYmustafa96]

it coulda be much more awesome with laser

[VegetableJuiceFTW]

Its not a camera.

Its not one-trillion frames per second recording.

It is made by combining a large amount of separate pictures taken at different moments.

Get it right, dammit.

[Nathan Milgram]

To put this in perspective, the amount of footage captured every second by this camera is about the same as 4,500,000 full-length films, although I can't imagine they were filming for anywhere close to a full second.

[JoshDavisNC]

A bullet fired at this speed would be slower than watching grass grow.

[christiandoritos]

I prefered the 6,0 × 10^19th frame to be honest, just look at it.

[A11YourBas3]

Doesnt look remotely real, looks like a cgi simulation