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,[3] 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.[4][5] More recently, light-in-flight holography has been performed in a scattering medium rather than using a reflective screen.[6][7] Light can also be captured in motion in a scattering medium using a
streak camera that has
picosecondtemporal 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.[8][9] 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.[10] 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.[11] Recent studies based on
computer tomography using data from multiple probe pulses enabled reconstruction of picosecond pulse propagation phenomena in condensed media.[12] In 2015 a method to visualize events evolving on picosecond time scales based on single-photon detector arrays has been demonstrated.[1]
^Abramson, Nils (1978-10-01). "Light-in-flight recording by holography". Optics Letters. 3 (4). The Optical Society: 121–123.
doi:
10.1364/ol.3.000121.
ISSN0146-9592.
^Abramson, Nils (1983-01-15). "Light-in-flight recording: high-speed holographic motion pictures of ultrafast phenomena". Applied Optics. 22 (2). The Optical Society: 215–232.
doi:
10.1364/ao.22.000215.
ISSN0003-6935.
^Abramson, Nils H.; Spears, Kenneth G. (1989-05-15). "Single pulse light-in-flight recording by holography". Applied Optics. 28 (10). The Optical Society: 1834–1841.
doi:
10.1364/ao.28.001834.
ISSN0003-6935.
^Häusler, G.; Herrmann, J. M.; Kummer, R.; Lindner, M. W. (1996-07-15). "Observation of light propagation in volume scatterers with 10^11-fold slow motion". Optics Letters. 21 (14). The Optical Society: 1087–1089.
doi:
10.1364/ol.21.001087.
ISSN0146-9592.
^Velten, A. et al. Femto-photography: capturing and visualizing the propagation of light. ACM Trans. Graph 32, 44:1–44:8 (2013).
^Velten, Andreas; Lawson, Everett; Bardagjy, Andrew; Bawendi, Moungi; Raskar, Ramesh (2011). Slow art with a trillion frames per second camera. Proceedings of SIGGRAPH. Vol. 44. New York, New York, USA: ACM Press.
doi:
10.1145/2037715.2037730.
^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).
^Goda, K.; Tsia, K. K.; Jalali, B. (2009). "Serial time-encoded amplified imaging for real-time observation of fast dynamic phenomena". Nature. 458 (7242). Springer Science and Business Media LLC: 1145–1149.
doi:
10.1038/nature07980.
ISSN0028-0836.