The World’s Fastest Camera Can Shoot 10 Trillion Frames Per Second

Researchers have created a new world’s fastest camera. Called T-CUP, the camera can capture a mind-boggling 10 trillion frames per second.

The camera was developed by scientists at the INRS branch of the UniversitĂ© du QuĂ©bec in Canada, and it doubles the previous record speed. Lund University’s FRAME camera boasted 5 trillion frames per second in 2017, beating out MIT’s one-trillion-frame-per-second camera of 2011.

At 10 trillion frames per second, T-CUP is able to freeze time in order to see and study things that are traditionally too fast to visualize — things like laser pulses can be seen in slow motion.

T-CUP broke new ground in its first shoot by capturing “the temporal focusing of a single femtosecond laser pulse in real time,” INRS says. The camera captured 25 frames at an interval of 400 femtoseconds (one femtosecond is 1/1,000,000,000,000,000, or one quadrillionth, of a second), revealing the light pulse’s shape, intensity, and angle of inclination.

As the camera is used for more applications at even faster frame rates, it will help reveal more previously-unknowable secrets involving how light and matter interact.


Image credits: Photos by INRS

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