Breaking ambiguities in mixed state ptychography

Recent advances in ptychographic imaging have shown how the technique extends naturally to mixed state experiments, for example when the illuminating radiation is partially coherent or when the object being imaged is laterally vibrating. To date, experiments using this mixed-state form of ptychography have relied on decomposition of the illumination ‘probe’ into multiple modes. In this paper we demonstrate, for the first time, ptychographic imaging with the simultaneous presence of both multiple probe and multiple object states. Our results prompt a discussion of uniqueness in the reconstructed images, and we show mathematically how ambiguities can arise. This leads us to extend the reconstruction process to include additional constraints that break these ambiguities, allowing interpretation of mixed object states that are not orthogonal.