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Andrei Nomerotski joined the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory to build a three-gigapixel camera for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), a massive instrument that will be installed in the mountains of Chile to capture the deepest and widest snapshots of the cosmos to date. The LSST is Nomerotski's main focus, yet he manages to find time to run a side project at Brookhaven: developing an ultrafast camera, called TimepixCam, that can detect either single photons or ions for astrophysics experiments and even more down-to-earth studies in fields from biology to quantum computing.
"To our knowledge, these are the first experiments that involve imaging single photons with simultaneous time stamping at the pixel level with 10 nanosecond time resolution," Nomerotski said in a recent paper illustrating TimepixCam's capabilities.
The idea for the superfast shooter sprouted when Nomerotski was working at Oxford University, developing a camera for chemists that could image and timestamp the flying molecular fragments produced in mass spectrometry, a common chemical-identification technique used in laboratories.
"When I came to Brookhaven I figured out how to make this type of camera in a much simpler way," Nomerotski said.
His latest rendition has a modest 256 by 256 pixel array, but its speed sets it apart, running roughly 4 million times faster than an iPhone shooting slow-motion video.
Putting the pieces together
Part of the key to this incredible speed is the camera's silicon sensor, which Nomerotski designed himself. It has a very thin surface conductive layer and an antireflective coating that allows it to absorb every possible speck of light and efficiently convert incoming photons into readable signals.
"The optical characteristics of image sensors we make for the LSST camera are similar to those of the silicon sensors we use in TimepixCam....