Friday's Video: Femto-Photography: Visualizing Photons in Motion at a Trillion Frames Per Second

A team from MIT has announced it has built an imaging solution that allows them to visualize propagation of light. The effective exposure time of each frame is two trillionths of a second and the resultant visualization depicts the movement of light at roughly half a trillion frames per second!

Direct recording of reflected or scattered light at such a frame rate with sufficient brightness is nearly impossible. They use an indirect 'stroboscopic' method that records millions of repeated measurements by careful scanning in time and viewpoints. Then the team has designed a method of rearranging the data to create a 'movie' of a nanosecond long event.

Project Director Ramesh Raskar, Associate Professor, MIT Media Lab recently presented his team’s findings at TEDTalks:

Ripples of Waves: A time-lapse visualization of the spherical
fronts of advancing light reflected by surfaces in the scene.

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