Newly built camera captures images of a photon 400-times better than ever before

Capturing the photon

To further improve understanding of the basic unit of light, scientists have intended to capture it for quite a while. More than two decades ago, researchers at Moscow University discovered the technology, but technical obstacles prevented the use of the method beyond research laboratories.

Researchers from NIST, the University of Colorado's Department of Physics, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology collaborated in the making of the SNSPD, which is also the largest array of a photon camera ever made.

The pixel array is 400 times larger than the previous largest photon camera and can capture light in frequencies ranging from infrared to ultraviolet and capture images at high-speed rates, as little as in picoseconds.

Applications of a photon camera

The technology can be deployed in space exploration, where researchers face the challenges of spotting smaller exoplanets against giant stars. Planets can be a million times fainter than the stars they revolve around, Sarah Steiger, a doctoral student working with high-speed photographic tools, told Phys.org. The SNSPD could help in the detection of that little light that emerges from the exoplanet that could potentially support life.

Far away from exoplanets and back on Earth, the SNSPD could also peer into our brains and help us study signals inside our neurons without actually disturbing living tissue. Researchers have developed multiple approaches for optically mapping the brain, but the signal processing of the output is complex, and we do not fully understand the impact on signal quality.

In comparison, a nanowire sensor opens up a myriad of possibilities for investigations without concerns of compromise; radiology experts told Phys.org. The researchers had to overcome a host of difficulties arising from electrical noise, readout speed, and environmental temperature to achieve the photographic precision and speed that the SNSPD delivers.

"These detectors operate at very low temperatures and generate a minimum of excess noise, making them ideal for testing the non-local nature of reality, investigating dark matter, mapping the early universe, and performing quantum computation and communication,” the researchers wrote in a pre-print paper published on arXiv last month.