Researchers create world’s fastest camera

Imaging the behaviour of photons is difficult as light is the fastest entity ever recorded in the universe, and capturing its trajectory on film calls for ultra fast cameras, CNET reported.

A new camera developed by Washington University, St Louis might be just what is needed to enable new discoveries about light. The researchers  claim it is the world's fastest 2D receive-only camera, capable of capturing images at the rate of up to 100 billion frames per second using a technique its creators call Compressed Ultrafast Photography (CUP).

The receive-only cameras currently in use image at a speed of around 10 million frames per second, limited by on-chip storage and electronic readout speed.

According to study leader Lihong Wang, PhD, Gene K Beare distinguished professor of Biomedical Engineering, for the first time humans could see light pulses on the fly.

He added, because the technique advanced imaging frame rates by orders of magnitude, we now entered a new regime to open up new visions. He added, each new technique, especially one of a quantum leap forward, was always followed by a number of new discoveries. He added it was the hope or researchers that CUP would enable new discoveries in science -- ones that one  could not even anticipate yet.

Wang and his colleagues hope that their innovation might lead to new scientific discoveries, especially in the fields of biomedicine, astronomy and forensics, natureworldnews.com reported.

For instance, the camera's advanced imaging frame rate could be used to detect diseases, analyse activity occurring in supernovas located light-years away. It could also monitor the movements of thousands of pieces of space junk currently whirling around the atmosphere, that  could potentially cause catastrophic collisions in a real life "Gravity."

According to Wang, because the technique advanced the imaging frame rate by orders of magnitude, a new regime to open up new visions was upon us.

The camera comprises a series of devices that might one day work with high-powered microscopes and telescopes to capture complex natural and physical phenomena.

CUP photographed an object with a specialty camera lens, which took the photons from the object and brought them to a tiny apparatus called a digital micromirror device (DMD), smaller than a dime.

The process used in the camera is detailed in in the journal Nature.

(Read more: World's fastest 2-D camera may enable new scientific discoveries)