Researchers have created a new world’s fastest camera. Called T-CUP, the camera can capture a mind-boggling 10 trillion frames per second.



The camera was developed by scientists at the INRS branch of the Université du Québec in Canada, and it doubles the previous record speed. Lund University’s FRAME camera boasted 5 trillion frames per second in 2017, beating out MIT’s one-trillion-frame-per-second camera of 2011.

At 10 trillion frames per second, T-CUP is able to freeze time in order to see and study things that are traditionally too fast to visualize — things like laser pulses can be seen in slow motion.

T-CUP broke new ground in its first shoot by capturing “the temporal focusing of a single femtosecond laser pulse in real time,” INRS says. The camera captured 25 frames at an interval of 400 femtoseconds (one femtosecond is 1/1,000,000,000,000,000, or one quadrillionth, of a second), revealing the light pulse’s shape, intensity, and angle of inclination.

As the camera is used for more applications at even faster frame rates, it will help reveal more previously-unknowable secrets involving how light and matter interact.

Image credits: Photos by INRS