Inverse-collimated proton radiography for imaging thin materials

Relativistic, magnetically focused proton radiography was invented at Los Alamos National Laboratory using the 800 MeV LANSCE beam and is inherently well-suited to imaging dense objects, at areal densities >20 g cm⁻². However, if the unscattered portion of the transmitted beam is removed at the Fourier plane through inverse-collimation, this system becomes highly sensitive to very thin media, of areal densities <100 mg cm⁻². Here, this inverse-collimation scheme is described in detail and demonstrated by imaging Xe gas with a shockwave generated by an aluminum plate compressing the gas at Mach 8.8. With a 5-mrad inverse collimator, an areal density change of just 49 mg cm⁻² across the shock front is discernible with a contrast-to-noise ratio of 3. Geant4 modeling of idealized and realistic proton transports can guide the design of inverse-collimators optimized for specific experimental conditions and show that this technique performs better for thin targets with reduced incident proton beam emittance. This work increases the range of areal densities to which the system is sensitive to span from ∼25 mg cm⁻² to 100 g cm⁻², exceeding three orders of magnitude. This enables the simultaneous imaging of a dense system as well as thin jets and ejecta material that are otherwise difficult to characterize with high-energy proton radiography.