Faster than light? Camera captures light bouncing off mirror at 100 billion frames a second

[babajees]

This High Speed Camera Tracks Light Bouncing Off a Mirror at 100bn FPS

Slow-motion photography is cool and all, but now a team of scientists has decided to use high-speed photography to track light as it travels through space. In this GIF, you're looking at a pulse of light hitting and bouncing off of a mirror. Really.
The researchers, based in Washington University in St. Louis, have used a technique called Compressed Ultrafast Photography (CUP) to chase the light at 100 billion frames per second. It's an advance on streak photography—where a sensor moves in the same direction as the light to try and image it—but extends the technique to two dimensions instead. The GIF above shows a laser pulse bouncing off a mirror, over a time period of about 300 picoseconds—that's 300trillionths of a second.
Neat, and it has some practical application, too. It's hoped that the new technique will allow us to understand the true dynamics of light, seeing how it reflects and refracts and helping advance the field of invisibility cloaking. [Gadgtecs]

 

[l'ingénieur]

Do you know if the recording is zoomed in or its the actual size?

 

[TimeTraveller]

Is it really possible.......?

 

[babajees]

Do you know if the recording is zoomed in or its the actual size?

Havent read the whole paper (availble here.. subscription required ) http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v516/n7529/full/516046a.html

But found this useful info:

With CUP, the photons necessary to take an image are blasted through a beam splitter and then through a tube that has several tiny mirrors. These photons are converted into electrons, which encode the data you want captured—namely the time and space data necessary to create an image. All of this happens in one billionth of a second, and the data can then be arranged into a video on a computer.

The technology is impressive and quite complex. Previous cameras could record at roughly a billion frames a second, but could only do so in one dimension—that meant you could measure space or time, but not both. And it was slower, anyway.

Other ultrafast cameras would require an event to occur many, many times in succession in order to record them. That means you'd have to blast a laser over and over just to get anything useful.

Here's what the camera looks like. The DMD is a "digital micromirror device" Image: Nature