Femto Photography
-- posted September 2014 --
Here is a link to a video from a TED talk about a unique camera that has ability to capture trillion (1015) frames per second.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_9vd4HWlVA
The talk was presented by Ramesh Raskar, a professor at MIT who led the team that developed the advanced imaging system.
For comparison, your laptop camera, or a smartphone camera, captures around 30 frames per second.
This imaging technique is also referred to as femto photography, where femto is a unit prefix for 10 to the power of -15 (recall the unit prefixes: 10-3 milli, 10-6 micro, 10-9 nano, 10-12 pico, 10-15 femto).
One can imagine the challenges of triggering trillion frames per second, and synchronizing the frames. Since providing sufficient brightness for recording such short exposure times is impossible, the team had to be creative and employ indirect recoding methods (i.e., periodic sampling). Among other challenges one can think of are: providing temporary memory for grabbing all those images, and storing trillion images per second on a hard drive.
My personal opinion is that the author is a little too enthusiastic when he talked about the possibility to see around corners by using this camera, through reconstruction of reflected rays of light.
In any case, the most mind-boggling idea about this camera is that it is so fast, so that it was able to capture the propagation of light!!!
Some of the potential application domains for the camera are: industrial imaging for fault detection and material properties analysis, imaging of ultrafast processes, medical applications for reconstructing sub-surface elements, etc.
P.S. A great thing about studying in a research lab is the opportunity to talk to other researchers and students about scientific advances. Thanks Aidin, for pointing out the femto camera.