每秒拍摄一千亿帧画面的全球最快二维相机诞生.docVIP

From VOA Learning English, this is the Technology Report. Imagine a camera that can take one hundred billion pictures a second -- that is enough to record the fastest movements in the universe. But we do not have to imagine it, because a scientist has invented such a camera. He calls it an imaging system. It may seem like science fiction, but it is science reality. Lihong Wang is a biomedical engineer at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He leads a team of researchers who have discovered several new imaging?techniques. For the first time, humans can literally see light pulses traveling in space at the speed of light. The speed of light is almost 300 million meters per second. At that speed, it would take just one second to travel around the world seven-and-a-half times. Mr. Wang photographs light particles moving at that speed using a unique camera. A screen grab from YouTube captured by Wangs new imaging system shows a laser pulse propagating in air and being reflected from a mirror. (Credit Lihong Wang, Washington University) The streak camera is a very specialized device that allows us to convert time into space. We convert light particles, or photons, into electrons, then pull the electrons, really hard, at different rates, depending on the time of arrival. So the time of arrival will be converted into different vertical positions. Mr. Wangs new technology improves on other ultra-fast cameras in important ways. Until now, streak cameras could only take a one-dimensional photograph. That is like looking through a vertical opening and trying to take a picture of something flying by really fast. The fastest cameras had to have an external, or outside, light source to work. But Mr. Wangs technique does not need special lighting. It produces two-dimensional images like regular photographs, but at a speed of one image every 10 trillionths of a second. Brian Pogue is a biomedical engineer at Dartmouth College in the eastern American sta