Abstract
Laser-plasma x-ray sources have garnered interest from various communities due to their ability to generate high photon-energies from a small source size. The passive imaging of high energy x-rays and neutrons is also a useful diagnostic in laser-driven fusion capsules as well as laboratory astrophysics experiments which aim to study small samples of transient electron-positron plasmas.Here we study a coded aperture with scatter and partial attenuation included, which we call a ‘CASPA’, and compare them to the more common method of pinhole imaging. As well as discussing the well-known increased throughput of coded apertures, we also show that the decoding algorithm relaxes the need for a thick substrate. We simulate a 511 keV x-ray source through ray-tracing and Geant4 simulations to show how incomplete attenuation of the source by the mask may be less detrimental to imaging using a CASPA than to using a standard pinhole system.
Highlights
Sub-millimetre radiation sources are ubiquitous in laserplasma physics, from the small x-ray sources produced for imaging [1], to understanding fusion targets [2,3,4] or astrophysical analogues [5] including those which aim to study pure electron-positron plasmas [6]
We propose that complete attenuation is not required for coded apertures to generate high signal to noise ratio (SNR) images
We demonstrate that this benefit is due to the way in which the image from a coded aperture is reconstructed, allowing a flat background to be removed
Summary
Sub-millimetre radiation sources are ubiquitous in laserplasma physics, from the small x-ray sources produced for imaging [1], to understanding fusion targets [2,3,4] or astrophysical analogues [5] including those which aim to study pure electron-positron plasmas [6]. Some such sources will produce other forms of high-energy radiation—for instance the 14.1 MeV neutrons from DT fusion reactions.
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