Researchers from Japan have developed a new high-speed camera that can record events at a rate of more than 1-trillion-frames-per-second. The STAMP (Sequentially Timed All-optical Mapping Photography) technology holds promise for the study of complex, ultrafast phenomena.
Keiichi Nakagawa, a research fellow at the University of Tokyo, experienced the need for a camera while studying how acoustic shock waves changed living cells. Scientists believe mechanical stress, like that caused by acoustic waves, may increase bone and blood vessel growth, but they had no tools for capturing the dynamics of such a fast, transient event as a shock wave passing through a cell.
STAMP relies on a property of light called dispersion. The technology splits an ultrashort pulse of light into a barrage of different colored flashes that hit the imaged object in rapid-fire succession. Each separate color flash can then be analyzed to string together a moving picture of what the object looked like over the time it took the dispersed light pulse to travel through the device.
Currently, the team is constructing an improved STAMP system that acquires 25 sequential images. Nakagawa believes the number of frames could eventually be increased to 100 with current technology.
The camera could be used to explore a wide range of ultrafast phenomena for the first time, including image electronic motion, the laser ignition of fusion, the phase transition of materials, and the dynamics of a Coulomb explosion, an event in which intense electromagnetic fields can force a small amount of solid material to explode into a hot plasma of ionized atomic particles.
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