Fastest camera

The fastest video/burst-mode camera is STAMP, developed by researchers at the University of Tokyo (JPN) and announced in a letter published in Nature Photonics on 10 Aug 2014. The camera is capable of recording events at 4.37 trillion frames per second (one frame every 229 femtoseconds).

In the past, the only way to make video-like recordings of superfast processes was to repeat experiments many times, slightly increasing the delay between the triggering of the event and the triggering of the camera each time (the so-called "pump-probe" method). Many of the processes scientists wish to study, however, happen differently every time they're repeated (explosions, biological processes, quantum-mechanical events), making this approach unworkable.

The University's of Tokyo's camera uses a technique the researchers call Sequentially Timed All-optical Mapping Photography (or STAMP). This system begins with a short burst of white laser light, which is passed into a component called the Temporal Mapping Device (TMD). The TMD uses a system of prisms and lenses to stretch out the laser pulse, then divide it into a succession of discrete "daughter" pulses, each tuned to a specific wavelength and spaced out to the desired frame-rate. The pulses strike the target and then pass into the second major component of the system – the Spatial Mapping Device (SMD). This uses passive optics (a diffraction grating) to direct each pulse of light to a different area of the image sensor. Each sector of the image sensor can then be copied and spliced together in sequence to get a motion-picture recording of an event.

The important feature of this system is that it has no moving parts or active electronic components aside from the initial laser pulse generator and the image sensor. These features were what limited the speed of previous designs. The University of Tokyo's prototype can only record in 6-frame bursts, but the technology could be scaled up to shoot longer videos (up to around 100 frames) by splitting the pulse further and using a larger sensor.