Neutron ghost imaging

Ghost imaging is demonstrated using a polyenergetic reactor source of thermal neutrons. This enables position resolution to be incorporated into a variety of neutron instruments that are not position resolving. Such a proof of concept enables several further applications. For example, in an imaging context, neutron ghost imaging can be beneficial for dose reduction and resolution enhancement. We explore the principle of resolution enhancement by employing a variant of the method in which each pixel of a position-sensitive detector is regarded as an independent bucket detector; a neutron ghost image is then computed for each pixel. We demonstrate the principle that this parallel form of neutron ghost imaging can significantly increase the spatial resolution of a pixelated detector such as a CCD or CMOS camera. Further applications and extensions of our neutron ghost-imaging protocol are discussed. These include neutron ghost tomography, neutron ghost microscopy, dark-field neutron ghost imaging, and isotope-resolved color neutron ghost imaging via prompt-gamma-ray bucket detection.A.M.K. and G.R.M. acknowledge the financial support of the Australian Research Council and FEI-Thermo Fisher Scientific through Linkage Project No. LP150101040, and the use of supercomputer time provided by Australia’s National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)