Synthetic aperture X-ray ghost imaging with sub-micron pixel resolution

Synthetic aperture X-ray ghost imaging (SAXGI) is proposed to achieve megapixel X-ray ghost imaging together with a reduced number of measurements. As the bucket detector array is artificially generated by post-pixel-binning of the images collected with the same detector as that in the reference arm, the unique advantages of SAXGI are not verified experimentally. In this paper, we developed a systematic solution of the experimental implementation of SAXGI, with the automatic interchange of 2× and 20× optical magnification of the detector for object and reference signal acquisition respectively, together with electronic pixel-binning of the detector. Taking the experimentally achieved 40×40 blocks as the bucket array in the object arm and addressing the challenge of image registration among the reference and object signals, we successfully achieved SAXGI imaging of 1960×1920 pixels with a pixel size of 0.325 µm. By developing a set of protocols improved in each part of the experiments, we can implement the data acquisition process of SAXGI in a few minutes, which is anticipated to facilitate the further application of the SAXGI method in related research fields.