Proton Camera

Lab researchers, working with Teledyne Imaging Sensors, have built the world's fastest camera, and it has just won an R&D 100 Award from R&D Magazine as one of the 100 most technologically significant products of 2007.

Made from two bonded microelectronic chips, the "Camera on a Chip" can capture 2.8 million frames per second. A normal motion picture camera captures 24 frames per second.

The camera produces movies of ultra-short (sub-microsecond) processes, mostly induced by powerful high explosives. These processes are studied using a remarkable imaging technique known as proton radiography, in which high-energy protons pass through an explosives-driven object to a screen, where they produce a blue "shadowgraph," essentially a two-dimensional representation of the object.

The camera takes pictures of the shadowgraphs in as little as 50 billionths of a second per frame, freezing images of the object's high-speed motions and storing up to three of them "on-chip" at one time. Several cameras can be used together to make a movie of tens of frames or more.

With very high sensitivity in both the visible and near-visible frequencies, the camera can also be used for a number of other applications, including studies of internal-combustion engines, vehicle-impact tests, and armor-penetration experiments; laser-beam identification of minerals on Mars; and location of fast-moving targets in space.........