World's Fastest Infrared Camera Is Making the Invisible Visible

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First Light Imaging, a French SME, has created the world’s fastest and most sensitive infrared scientific camera with support from EU funding. Initially developed for astronomy, the technology is expected to find numerous applications in research and industry.

As astronomers look forward to a new generation of ever-larger telescopes – such as the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) to be constructed on a mountain in Chile – the problem of the distorting effects of the Earth’s atmosphere becomes more pressing.

Atmospheric turbulence causes the blurring of telescope images, but researchers within the EU-funded OCAMIR project have now developed a fast and sensitive infrared scientific camera that can help astronomers compensate for this using a technique known as adaptive optics.

Credit: © GinaSanders – fotolia.com

The company behind the project, First Light Imaging, is a spin-off from French astronomical institutes Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM) and Institut de Planétologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG). It has already produced a high-speed visible light camera called OCAM, developed with support from the EU’s Opticon network for astronomical instrumentation.

“OCAM, for visible light, is the fastest low-noise camera in the world today and we wanted to do the same for the infrared,” says Cécile Brun, First Light’s marketing manager. “It is very important for astronomers to have access to infrared technologies.”
3 500 images a second

Infrared scientific cameras are not new, but until now there has been a trade-off between frame rate and sensitivity. The new OCAMIR camera, which is being marketed as C-RED One, has both. It can take up to 3 500 images a second while maintaining high sensitivity. It operates at wavelengths from 0.8 to 2.5 micrometres in the short-wave infrared (SWIR) region of the spectrum.

At the heart of C-RED One is an innovative sensor developed in the UK by Leonardo SpA – known as an e-APD array – which can reliably detect single photons with very little background noise.

Conventional astronomical infrared cameras are cooled with liquid nitrogen to reduce noise, but the nitrogen needs replenishing every few hours. C-RED One uses a ‘pulse tube’ thermoelectric cooler instead, which allows the camera to operate continuously at equally low temperatures for long periods.

While initial use will predominantly be in astronomy – two cameras have already been delivered to US universities and a third is on order for a French institution – Brun sees the potential market as much wider. “We know that the outstanding performance of the camera will open unexpected fields of applications and we are still working to find them.”Image of test fringes obtained with the MIRC-X instrument and C-RED One. Top is the image without gain, equivalent to the one obtained with a classical scientific infrared camera, bottom is the image obtained with C-RED One, showing the spectacular increase of signal to noise ratio when avalanche gain is applied.