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MIT researchers from the Media Lab  (Ramesh Raskar, Moungi G. Bawendi, Andreas Velten)  have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion exposures per second. That’s fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of a burst of light traveling the length of a one-liter bottle, bouncing off the cap and reflecting back to the bottle’s bottom.

For more information on this topic, please visit MIT's link at :

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/trillion-fps-camera-1213.html

MIT's page says that "The trillion-frame-per-second imaging system, which the researchers have presented both at the Optical Society's Computational Optical Sensing and Imaging conference and at Siggraph, is a spinoff of another Camera Culture project, a camera that can see around corners. That camera works by bouncing light off a reflective surface - say, the wall opposite a doorway - and measuring the time it takes different photons to return. But while both systems use ultrashort bursts of laser light and streak cameras, the arrangement of their other optical components and their reconstruction algorithms are tailored to their disparate tasks.

Because the ultrafast-imaging system requires multiple passes to produce its videos, it can't record events that aren't exactly repeatable. Any practical applications will probably involve cases where the way in which light scatters - or bounces around as it strikes different surfaces - is itself a source of useful information. Those cases may, however, include analyses of the physical structure of both manufactured materials and biological tissues - "like ultrasound with light," as Raskar puts it"