The ROSS Streak Camera

2005:

LLE licensed the Rochester Optical Streak System (ROSS) technology to Sydor Instruments, LLC, a Rochester-based business, to commercialize the technology for use in research around the world. Sydor Instruments was founded in 2004 to commercialize such high-precision instruments by transferring technology from laser research programs that develop new instrument technology to other laser research programs in need of measuring new levels of performance. Sydor hailed the ROSS as the “streak camera for the next 30 years.”

The ROSS was developed by LLE to meet the high-speed data collection needs of the Laboratory’s laser-fusion experiments program on the OMEGA laser. The ROSS camera can record transient events with a time resolution better than 5 ps. The ROSS system employs a patented automatic self-calibration technique that achieves 1% measurement accuracy. Eight prototype ROSS systems have operated on OMEGA experiments for more than five years, accumulating more than a half million streak measurements with better than 99.9% reliability.