Resolution-enhanced x-ray ghost imaging with polycapillary optics

Abstract

Ghost imaging (GI) enables compressive and lens-free image formation using a single-pixel detector and structured illumination, thus providing a promising and cost-effective approach to dose-reduced x-ray imaging. At this stage, a major bottleneck in almost all x-ray GI schemes is that the minimum resolution is strictly subject to the unit size of structured illumination. To overcome this widespread and inflexible resolution limitation, we introduced polycapillary optics into x-ray GI, in which polycapillary x-ray optics scaled down the input x-ray shadow pattern intactly and experimentally enabled a ∼3× resolution improvement. In general, polycapillary x-ray optics could be flexibly integrated in various x-ray GI applications with a demand of resolution larger than the diameter of the individual capillary composing of polycapillary optics, to achieve free resolution gain.