Influence factors of resolution in laser accelerated proton radiography and image deblurring

Contact imaging based on MeV energy laser accelerated protons is studied in this paper. First, we show that both external structures and the internal organs of ants can be distinguished with micrometer spatial resolution by proton radiography. Then, we systematically study several specific influence factors and their coupled effects on the spatial resolution of proton radiography, i.e., the accumulated shot number, the proton irradiation dose, the different types of detectors, and the incident proton energy, using two specially designed resolution calibration targets. Under our experimental conditions with MeV protons, the best resolution obtained with the radiochromic film is 20 μm, and that with the solid-state nuclear-track detector (CR39) is 10 μm. In the end, we propose an image deblurring algorithm that uses deconvolution to eliminate the blurring caused by the nonzero spatial extent of the source and multiple Coulomb scattering. This work studies the comprehensive factors of laser accelerated proton radiography with resolution calibration targets and presents incremental additions to previous work on proton radiography.