
Single-shot compressed photography at one hundred billion frames per second - mlrtime
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v516/n7529/full/nature14005.html
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devindotcom
Good lord. I was ready to be disappointed by another streak camera, but this
is insane. If I understand it correctly, it bounces the image off a
micromirror array with a pseudorandom patterns being shone on it for sub-
nanosecond durations, then collects the composite image by sort of scattering
it in a known way over a CCD, and the original image can be sussed out of that
once the data has been pulled down.

10^7 frames per second! Anyone have any ideas what we could watch at a rate
like that? You only get 350 frames, though, it seems, and the spatial
resolution is probably only a handful of pixels.

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achille2
It's 10^11 frames per second actually -- light travels 3 millimeters between
each frame.

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runeks
That's pretty fascinating.

Isn't that useful beyond photography? If this detector can detect just a
single bit of information every 10^-11 second, that's 100 Gbit/s.

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kordless
For a single pixel!

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chockablock
Free read-only link: [http://rdcu.be/bLy6](http://rdcu.be/bLy6)

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ics
Not sure if it's because of HTTPSwitchboard or not, but copy/paste, print,
etc. all seems to work fine. The loading time is pretty bad however. (Also,
thanks!)

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davesque
Here's a link to the supplemental videos for the article:

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v516/n7529/fig_tab/natu...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v516/n7529/fig_tab/nature14005_SV1.html)

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anigbrowl
#4 is really nice; light moving at different speeds in different media. I'm
also struck by #2, light reflecting off a mirror, because some of the photons
apparently carry on through the mirror (he said, as if recording the main
packet bouncing off it were no big deal...).

In the near term, could this technology lead to to the development of improved
beam splitters, mirrors, bottles etc. that would drive the development of
optical computing?

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davesque
Quoting the caption from figure 3 in the article:

"The bright spot behind the mirror is attributed to imperfect resolution."

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ejk314
What is that "faster-than-light propagation of non-information" they mention
observing?

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andrewaylett
It's when you (for example) sweep a beam across a field. The spot of light can
move really quickly, even crossing the field faster than light itself could,
but it's not conveying information from where it's been to where it's going.
Nothing physical is moving at anything even approaching the speed of light.

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maaaats
Wow, I've never considered such a thing before. Can this be used for anything?

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Semiapies
Sadly, no. Imagine an immense wall light-years wide and a light-year or so
away from you. If you have a (really!) bright laser pointing at it, you can
wiggle around the dot so that the dot moves at FTL speeds. But, there'll be at
least a year's lag from your wiggle to the dot moving (and another year before
_you_ can see the dot move), so you can't use it for signaling faster-than-
light or anything like that.

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ezpuzzle
unless there's an alien with another laser pointer on the other side ;)

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keville
I look forward to watching a movie of photons getting trapped in quantum wells
during photosynthesis sometime soon!

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chm
The paper is clearly written, read it if you can.

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ssewell
Amazing! You can actually see the laser pulse bouncing off of the material!

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XilE
Ramesh Raskar presents femto-photography, a new type of imaging so fast it
visualizes the world one trillion frames per second, so detailed it shows
light itself in motion. This technology may someday be used to build cameras
that can look “around” corners or see inside the body without X-rays.

[http://www.ted.com/talks/ramesh_raskar_a_camera_that_takes_o...](http://www.ted.com/talks/ramesh_raskar_a_camera_that_takes_one_trillion_frames_per_second?language=en)

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iamdave
*jaw drops to the first floor

