Our scientific world is both expanding and getting more precise every day.
We’re pushing the boundaries of what we’d ever thought possible...but that means the
way we measure that science has to keep getting more precise too.
Are we ever going to hit the limit of what we can see...and therefore what we can discover?
Well, new research has now given us the world’s fastest camera--so that’s a step in the
right direction.
Hashtag ‘no filter’.
To give you the whole picture, back in the 1920’s a pioneering electrical engineer
named Harold Edgerton made history when he was able to capture images of things that
happened on the microsecond scale--that’s one-millionth of a second
Flash forward to today, and we’ve moved beyond the microsecond.
Many research facilities around the world want to explore stuff that’s happening in
the femtosecond range.
That’s a quadrillionth of a second.
Literally millionths of a billionth of a second.
What kind of things happen that fast?
Well for one, LASERS.
Lasers that fire femtosecond pulses can help us explore the tiny nooks and crannies of
our universe.
They’re being used in materials processing, to fabricate micromachines and biochips.
Ultrafast pulse lasers have enabled fields like biophotonics, which let us image the
function of live tissues in 3D--which has helped us expand our understanding of the
physical function of the human brain.
And these kinds of laser pulses are essential for photochemistry and photobiology, fields
that let us see natural reactions on a molecular level.
So the ultrafast laser equals ultrasmall imaging
scale.
BUT the problem here is that it is so freaking hard to get a picture of what’s happening
at the femtosecond speed, you guys.
It’s REAL snappy.
Until now, the best way we’ve had to image the interactions that happen anywhere even
close to this pace are what are called ‘streak cameras’.
You have to capture multiple pulses over a period of time to create what is basically
a stop motion video of the interaction.
It’s not the most accurate picture of what’s happening and in some experiments, the material
is too fragile to fire the laser at it multiple times.
You ONLY get to fire the laser once.
So how do you take a picture?
If you’re the researchers in this experiment, you make a hybrid.
This new technology is called single-shot 10-trillion-frame-per-second compressed ultrafast
photography--or T-CUP for short.
It combines a version of the typical streak camera with a static camera and then uses
a mathematical technique called radon transformation to yield images of the laser-material interaction
at a resolution of--as the name state--a trillion frames per second.
Which is a heck of a lot more accurate than previous attempts.
This new camera system can combine the frames it captures to make a movie where we can actually
see the movement of light.
This camera is basically like recording in 1080HD after only being able to look at something
in gif quality.
And the team’s not done yet!
They have plans to keep increasing the precision of this camera, hoping to get the resolution
all the way to a quadrillion frames per second.
This is the fastest camera ever created, capturing the behavior of a femtosecond long laser pulse
passing through glass, fast enough to image nanoscale interaction between the laser and
the matter.
And see how it takes a pretty long time to pass through the beam splitter in the middle?
That’s something we’ve never been able to visually see before, and that’s really
important to experimental design and function of laser systems.
Frame by frame, we are getting closer to being able to actually see the tiny details of the
world.
This new level of insight will allow us to ask new questions--both about the light itself
and everything it helps
us see.
My favorite thing that can be imaged at the molecular level is photosynthesis.
Using femtosecond laser pulses, we can generate X-rays that help us see INSIDE cells, down
to the individual proteins that act in photosynthesis...some of this process is actually still a mystery
that we’re trying to uncover.
Make sure to subscribe to Seeker for more groundbreaking discoveries like this, and
thanks for watching.