The international team of researchers at Institute National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Institute of Research) has devised a machine to capture photons in action. When a particle is in motion with a speed of light, a special device was needed to capture picture. Named as the world’s fastest UV camera, it is capable of capturing ultra-fast events lasting even a picoseconds. The device is been named as UV-CUP. Compressed ultrafast photography CUP is an emerging imaging technique that has been used to capture ultrafast events at speeds measured in trillions of frames a second, but has so far been limited to visible and near-infrared wavelengths.
Jinyang Liang who led the study says, sensing shorter wavelengths enable to see the movement on a spatial scale. UV or X-ray range sensing gives good result. About the device development, she said first a special photocathode was developed and is integrated to a streak camera specially designed to measure ultra-fast optical phenomenon, the team next developed an algorithm to take data and construct image from the data. About operation, it is a two step process. First the information in the transient event is squeezed into a snapshot in the data acquisition and secondly it is fed to a reconstruction algorithm to retrieve the movie.
The team is still in research to improvise the device. They are aiming to replace photocathode which is of limited efficiency. Another aim is to increase the speed of algorithm and image construction with the help of AI. The UV-cup has gone to next step, in a France research lab it is capturing different physical phenomenon including laser plasma generation, UV florescence. The results will help in improvising the medical imaging techniques used to diagnose disease.
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