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Comment by devindotcom | Hacker News Reader

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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It is not 10^7 FPS. It is 10^11 FPS.

And they do collect that scattered light on a streak camera - that performs shearing operation in the temporal domain (camera moves during capture). Without it it would be impossible to reproject the data into these 10^11 FPS, you would only have your regular 10^7 FPS, achievable by CCD/CMOS.

edit. The temporal / spatial resolution probably can be increased by using larger sensor :) & Anyone wants to hack a DIY version of it? Take a Lytro camera, place it on the piezo actuator, do some fancy math ;)

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

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.

For a single pixel!

Oops, you're right. I'd edit if i could.

Is it related to compressed sensing? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_sensing

Edit: I was thinking about the single-pixel camera: http://dsp.rice.edu/cscamera

Yes it is compressed sensing. Compressed sensing is where you have an input that is randomly 'combined' and then you reconstruct the signal you want (it has to be sparse in some way) using the L1 norm.

Looks like you can watch a laser pulse bounce off a mirror or difract into a resin. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v516/n7529/fig_tab/natu...

These are movies of things I never thought we would have movies of. It reminds me of when the first pictures from STMs came out - we never thought we would see pictures of atoms and molecules in our lifetimes - even if they were just arrays of bumps on a surface. Praise to the team that did this work, it's a gift to the world.

Now that technology is here, I do not think it would be as much of a challenge to increase number of frames compared to original research. Also can this resolve what is going on in the cell? Would be quite a boon to protein folding research if we can see clearly how the process happens.

Nope because that is limited by the diffraction limit for white light or evescent propogation for FL. You might be able to come up with something clever with FRET but I dont see comming up with something clever being limited by fps speeds.

A nuclear explosion please.

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