In the Media Lab of MIT researchers have developed a camera able to take images in extreme slow-motion. The camera captures a trillion frames per second, fast enough for light pulses to follow.
Actually it is the device that the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed not one camera, but five hundred sensors. The light source is a titaniumsaffier laser light pulses issuing. A special camera captures these pulses, and the observed data by a computer to a delayed film processed. The camera can, however, only in one dimension, which mirrors the scene from top to bottom to scan, so that a 2d film can be made. An event must therefore be reproducible to a delayed movie to be able to reconstruct it.
The camera has a normal lens, but behind it is a separate body. The light from the laser passes through a slit and falls on the first sensor. The light is then deflected by an electric field of the photons to the other 499 sensors deflects. That happens with a frequency of a billion hertz, which enables the camera to light pulses to capture. The camera, its laser and other equipment cost about $ 250,000 and are as yet purely a research project.
According to one of the developers of the camera, Andreas Velten, the extremely fast camera in the future also be used for other purposes. So, would photons instead of sound waves can be used for medical applications such as ultrasound.