Development and Applications of Single-Shot Compressed Optical-Streaking Ultrahigh-Speed Imaging

Abstract

Higher temporal resolution has been extensively pursued in photography for decades. Although currently charge-coupled device (CCD) and complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technologies have revolutionized high-speed and ultrahigh-speed photography, further increasing their temporal resolution is fundamentally limited by the bandwidth of the electronics and on-chip storage. Existing ultrahigh-speed CCD/CMOS cameras have achieved the temporal resolution of the sub-microsecond level at the cost of pixel count, size, and price. Compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) is an emerging two-dimensional (2D) computational imaging modality that synergistically combines compressed sensing (CS) with streak imaging. CUP enables capturing non-repetitive time-evolving events at picosecond-level temporal resolution and has led to a variety of exciting discoveries and applications in physics such as the observation of optical chaos, dissipative soliton dynamics, and photonics Mach cone. Despite the salient advantage in temporal resolution, CUP cannot record long-lasting dynamics (e.g., upconversion luminescence processes on the order of microseconds and milliseconds) in a single shot, due to optoelectronic sweeping time of less than nanoseconds. Furthermore, a limited quantum efficiency (QE) and the space-charge effect in the optoelectronic streak cameras restrain the signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and spatial resolution of the CUP’s measurement, respectively. To overcome these limitations, this dissertation focuses on efforts in developing cost-efficient and compact ultrahigh-speed imaging (i.e., sub-microsecond temporal resolution) hardware, high-fidelity image reconstruction software, and pertinent applications.