Verification of the Optical System of the 9.7-m Prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope
Creators: name: Adams, C.
name: Alfaro, R.
name: Ambrosi, G.
name: Ambrosio, M.
name: Aramo, C.
name: Benbow, W.
name: Bertucci, B.
name: Bissaldi, E.
name: Bitossi, M.
name: Boiano, A.
name: Bonavolontà, C.
name: Bose, R.
name: Brill, A.
name: Buckley, J. H.
name: Byrum, K.
name: Cameron, R. A.
name: Capasso, M.
name: Caprai, M.
name: Covault, C. E.
name: Di Venere, L.
name: Fegan, S.
name: Feng, Q.
name: Fiandrini, E.
name: Furniss, A.
name: Garczarczyk, M.
name: Garfias, F.
name: Gent, A.
name: Giglietto, N.
name: Giordano, F.
name: González, M. M.
name: Halliday, R.
name: Hervet, O.
name: Hughes, G.
name: Humensky, T. B.
name: Ionica, M.
name: Iriarte, A.
name: Jin, W.
name: Kaarat, P.
name: Kieda, D.
name: Kim, B.
name: Licciulli, F.
name: Limon, M.
name: Loporchio, S.
name: Masone, V.
name: Meures, T.
name: Mode, B. A. W.
name: Mukherjee, R.
name: Nieto, D.
name: Okumura, A.
name: Otte, N.
name: La Palombara, N.
name: Pantaleo, F. R.
name: Paoletti, R.
name: Pareschi, G.
name: Petrashyk, A.
name: Powell, J.
name: Powell, K.
name: Ribeiro, D.
name: Roache, E.
name: Rousselle, J.
name: Rugliancich, A.
name: Ruíz-Díaz-Soto, J.
name: Santander, M.
name: Schlenstedt, S.
name: Scuderi, S.
name: Shang, R.
name: Sironi, G.
name: Stevenson, B.
name: Stiaccini, L.
name: Taylor, L. P.
name: Tosti, L.
name: Tovmassian, G.
name: Vagelli, V.
name: Valentino, M.
name: Vandenbroucke, J.
name: Vassiliev, V. V.
name: Wakely, S. P.
name: Wilcox, P.
name: Williams, D. A.
name: Yu, P.
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2020
Subjects: subject: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
subject: High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex)
subject: FOS: Physical sciences
subject: FOS: Physical sciences

description: For the first time in the history of ground-based $γ$-ray astronomy, the on-axis performance of the dual mirror, aspheric, aplanatic Schwarzschild-Couder optical system has been demonstrated in a $9.7$-m aperture imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescope. The novel design of the prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope (pSCT) is motivated by the need of the next-generation Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) observatory to have the ability to perform wide ($\geq 8^{\circ}$) field-of-view observations simultaneously with superior imaging of atmospheric cascades (resolution of $0.067^{\circ}$ per pixel or better). The pSCT design, if implemented in the CTA installation, has the potential to improve significantly both the $γ$-ray angular resolution and the off-axis sensitivity of the observatory, reaching nearly the theoretical limit of the technique and thereby making a major impact on the CTA observatory sky survey programs, follow-up observations of multi-messenger transients with poorly known initial localization, as well as on the spatially resolved spectroscopic studies of extended $γ$-ray sources. This contribution reports on the initial alignment procedures and point-spread-function results for the challenging segmented aspheric primary and secondary mirrors of the pSCT.
description: 19 pages, 11 figures, proceedings for SPIE Optical Engineering + Applications, 2020, Online Only