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GOTTA SEE>VIDEO>Watch as light particles crawl through a Coke bottle at a trillion frames per second
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[link to io9.com]
Watch light particles crawl through a Coke bottle at a trillion frames per second
Three MIT physicists took the idea of high-exposure photography and cranked it up to absolutely ridiculous levels, using special optical equipment to show actual light particles on the move. Prepare to see the fastest thing you'll ever see... in slow motion.
The video up top was created using a streak camera, a new form of imaging technology that shoots light particles, or photons, through a narrow slit into an electric field. This electric field deflects the photons in a direct perpendicular to their original path. The camera detects the degree of deflection, and uses this to build up a two-dimensional image. However, these aren't the dimensions of an ordinary photo - one is the spatial dimension of the photon moving on a straight line, and the other dimension is the time it takes to move through the field.
To create a more traditional type of two-dimensional image - one with width and length - the experiment needs to be repeated millions of times, with the streak camera ever so slightly moved after each attempt. That sounds like it would take forever - and indeed, team member Ramesh Raskar has dubbed this "the world's slowest fastest camera" — but when it only takes a nanonsecond for the light to move through the field, all the necessary data can be gathered in about an hour.
Using a computer algorithm, all the different results can be stitched together into a sequence of coherent two-dimensional images of light on the move. Each frame has an exposure time of about 1.71 picoseconds, or just over a trillionth of a second. The videos are
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