Some natural phenomena, such as the movement of a photon, cannot be captured with traditional cameras. For this, special super-high-speed equipment is being created . For the same purpose, American engineers have developed a new 3D camera capable of shooting video at a rate of up to 100 billion frames per second, which allows you to “catch” objects at the speed of light.
A new development by scientists at the California Institute of Technology allows you to capture the movement of an object that moves at the speed of light. At such prohibitive speeds in the early stages of testing, engineers were able to get only flat photos, but using the technology of single-frame stereo-polarimetric compressed ultrafast photography (SP-CUP), the algorithm of which is similar to human vision, the researchers managed to raise the frame rate per second to 100 billion and while getting a full-fledged 3D image.
SP-CUP works as follows: the lens of an ultrafast camera is represented by a lens divided into two halves, which, as it were, imitates the work of a person’s left and right eyes. The images arriving at the central processing unit are then converted into a three-dimensional image. The development of the researchers is able to recognize the polarization of light waves, and this phenomenon is used everywhere: in the manufacture of anti-reflective sunglasses, LCD displays, and camera lenses.
The invention of American scientists will help to better understand the physics of sonoluminescence – a process in which tiny bubbles in liquids are created under the influence of sound waves. Bursting, such a bubble emits light. Scientists have not yet been able to explain this phenomenon. Also, a superfast camera will help reveal the secrets of other processes inaccessible to the naked human eye.