Low-cost passive single-shot ultrafast imaging at 685 Gfps

TL;DR

This paper introduces a low-cost, passive, single-shot ultrafast imaging system that captures picosecond laser pulses at 685 Gfps using off-the-shelf components and no complex computation.

Contribution

It presents the first fully passive, low-cost ultrafast imaging architecture assembled from commercial components, achieving high frame rates without computational imaging.

Findings

Captures ultrafast phenomena at 685 Gfps with a 1.46 ps sampling interval.

System costs less than US$500, making ultrafast imaging more accessible.

Successfully recovers Gaussian pulse profiles and characterizes spatial resolution.

Abstract

Capturing ultrafast transient phenomena conventionally requires streak cameras or computational imaging based on compressed sensing, which lead to complex and costly systems. In this Letter, we demonstrate, to the best of our knowledge, the first fully passive single-shot ultrafast imaging architecture assembled entirely from off-the-shelf, low-cost components. A commercial microlens array combined with a stack of standard microscope cover glasses maps temporal information into multiple spatial channels, and a consumer-grade CMOS image sensor records all delayed replicas within a single camera exposure. The proposed system has a total hardware cost below US\$500 and captures the evolution of a picosecond laser pulse with a temporal sampling interval of 1.46~ps, an effective frame rate of 685~Gfps, and a sequence depth of ten frames. The temporal fidelity of the system is verified by recovering the expected Gaussian pulse profile, and the spatial resolution is characterized through a point-source measurement with a point spread function of 1.86 and 1.62 pixels full width at half maximum along the horizontal and vertical directions, respectively. The proposed architecture presents an alternative approach to single-shot ultrafast imaging with a simple, low-cost, computation-free, and fully passive design.