Light-in-flight imaging

500 ps laser pulse propagation in air visualized by a single-photon detector arrays[1]

Light-in-flight imaging — a set of techniques to visualize propagation of light through different media.

History and techniques

Light was first captured in its flight by N. Abramson in 1978,[2] who used a holographic technique to record the wavefront of a pulse propagating and being scattered by a white-painted screen placed in its path. This high-speed recording technique allowed the dynamic observation of light phenomena like reflection, interference and focusing that are normally observed statically.[3][4] More recently, light-in-flight holography has been performed in a scattering medium rather than using a reflective screen.[5][6] Light can also be captured in motion in a scattering medium using a streak camera that has picosecond temporal resolution, thus removing the need for interferometry and coherent illumination but requires additional hardware to raster scan the two-dimensional (2D) scene, which increases the acquisition time to hours.[7][8] A few other techniques possess the temporal resolution to observe light in motion as it illuminates a scene, such as photonic mixer devices based on modulated illumination, albeit with a temporal resolution limited to a few nanoseconds.[9] Alternatively, time-encoded amplified imaging can record images at the repetition rate of a laser by exploiting wavelength-encoded illumination of a scene and amplified detection through a dispersive fibre, albeit with 160 ns temporal and spatial resolution.[10] Recent studies based on computer tomography using data from multiple probe pulses enabled reconstruction of picosecond pulse propagation phenomena in condensed media.[11] In 2015 a method to visualize events evolving on picosecond time scales based on single-photon detector arrays has been demonstrated.[1]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 G. Gariepy et al., Single-photon sensitive light-in-fight imaging. Nature Communications 6, 6021 (2015).
  2. ↑ Abramson, N. Light-in-flight recording by holography. Opt. Lett. 3, 121–123 (1978).
  3. ↑ Abramson, N. Light-in-flight recording: high-speed holographic motion pictures of ultrafast phenomena. Appl. Opt. 22, 215–232 (1983).
  4. ↑ Abramson, N. H. & Spears, K. G. Single pulse light-in-flight recording by holography. Appl. Opt. 28, 1834–1841 (1989).
  5. ↑ Häusler, G., Herrmann, J. M., Kummer, R. & Lindner, M. W. Observation of light propagation in volume scatterers with 1011-fold slow motion. Opt. Lett. 21, 1087–1089 (1996).
  6. ↑ Kubota, T., Komai, K., Yamagiwa, M. & Awatsuji, Y. Moving picture recording and observation of three-dimensional image of femtosecond light pulse propagation. Opt. Express 15, 14348–14354 (2007).
  7. ↑ Velten, A. et al. Femto-photography: capturing and visualizing the propagation of light. ACM Trans. Graph 32, 44:1–44:8 (2013).
  8. ↑ Velten, A., Lawson, E., Bardagjy, A., Bawendi, M. & Raskar, R. Slow art with a trillion frames per second camera. Proc. SIGGRAPH 44 (2011).
  9. ↑ Heide, F., Hullin, M. B., Gregson, J. & Heidrich, W. Low-budget transient imaging using photonic mixer devices. ACM Trans. Graph 32, 45:1–45:10 (2013).
  10. ↑ Goda, K., Tsia, K. & Jalali, B. Serial time-encoded amplified imaging for real-time observation of fast dynamic phenomena. Nature 458, 1145–1149 (2009).
  11. ↑ Li, Z., Zgadzaj, R., Wang, X., Chang, Y.-Y. & Downer, M. C. Single-shot tomographic movies of evolving light-velocity objects. Nat. Commun. 5, 3085 (2014).
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