World’s first have happened this month as researchers from Washington University capture on camera a sonic boom, officially known as a photonic Mach cone. For those who aren’t in the know, a Mach cone is what’s created when something goes faster that than the waves it’s emitting. It were the first of its kind ever to be captured and was done using a new type of ultra speed camera that can take trillions of frames each second. Think of it as the same as a sonic boom, where a plane goes faster than the speed of sound, but this time relate it to light.
The team was able to create the photonic Mach cone by slowing light down so that it goes through some materials faster than others. Optical engineer Jinyang Liang led the experiment and involved creating a channel between two plates of powdered aluminum oxide and silicon rubber with the gap being filled with a dry-ice fog. Then, a laser pulse was fired for seven picoseconds and the scattering the suspended particles. Because the light was able to pass through the fog faster than the tunnel, it created a photonic Mach cone as it went.
While previous attempts have been made to capture these light cones, none had managed to film it as a single instance in real time using an ultrafast streak camera like Liang and team. They captured three different views of the same event making it easier to tag each image and keep them in some kind of order. Liang said, “Our camera is fast enough to watch neurons fire and image live traffic in the brain. We hope we can use our system to study neural networks to understand how the brain works.”
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