100-Trillion-Frame-per-Second Single-Shot Compressed Ultrafast Photography via Molecular Alignment

Compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) has the highest imaging speed and sequence depth in capturing ultrafast nonrepeatable or unstable dynamic events with snapshots. However, due to the Coulomb interaction of electrons in a streak camera, it is difficult for the imaging speed of CUP to break the speed limit of 1012 frames/s. Here, we propose a molecular-alignment-assisted CUP (MACUP) scheme by introducing a gas-phase temporal-spatial converter with all-optical deflection imaging into conventional CUP. Based on our simulation of a carbon dioxide molecular deflector, combined with point-spread restrictions in imaging, MACUP is able to achieve an imaging speed beyond 180 × 1012 frames/s and a sequence depth of about 300 frames in a single exposure. To demonstrate the feasibility of MACUP, we simulate the spatiotemporal intensity measurement of a chirped femtosecond laser pulse and study the image reconstruction accuracy in the intensity and wavelength evolutions. These results show that MACUP is a promising single-shot ultrafast optical imaging strategy to unravel unprecedented dynamics in ultrafast atomic and molecular optics.