Design and Performance of the Prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope Camera
Abstract
The prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope (pSCT) is a candidate for a medium-sized telescope in the Cherenkov Telescope Array. The pSCT is based on a novel dual mirror optics design which reduces the plate scale and allows for the use of silicon photomultipliers as photodetectors. The prototype pSCT camera currently has only the central sector instrumented with 25 camera modules (1600 pixels), providing a 2.68 field of view (FoV). The camera electronics are based on custom TARGET (TeV array readout with GSa/s sampling and event trigger) application specific integrated circuits. Field programmable gate arrays sample incoming signals at a gigasample per second. A single backplane provides camera-wide triggers. An upgrade of the pSCT camera is in progress, which will fully populate the focal plane. This will increase the number of pixels to 11,328, the number of backplanes to 9, and the FoV to 8.04. Here we give a detailed description of the pSCT camera, including the basic concept, mechanical design, detectors, electronics, current status and first light.
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@article{arxiv.2203.08169,
title = {Design and Performance of the Prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope Camera},
author = {Colin B. Adams and Giovanni Ambrosi and Michelangelo Ambrosio and Carla Aramo and Timothy Arlen and Wystan Benbow and Bruna Bertucci and Elisabetta Bissaldi and Jonathan Biteau and Massimiliano Bitossi and Alfonso Boiano and Carmela Bonavolontà and Richard Bose and Aurelien Bouvier and Mario Buscemi and Aryeh Brill and Anthony M. Brown and James H. Buckley and Rodolfo Canestrari and Massimo Capasso and Mirco Caprai and Paolo Coppi and Corbin E. Covault and Davide Depaoli and Leonardo Di Venere and Manel Errando and Stephen Fegan and Qi Feng and Emanuele Fiandrini and Amy Furniss and Markus Garczarczyk and Alasdair Gent and Nicola Giglietto and Francesco Giordano and Enrico Giro and Robert Halliday and Olivier Hervet and Gareth Hughes and Simone Incardona and Thomas B. Humensky and Maria Ionica and Weidong Jin and Caitlin A. Johnson and David Kieda and Frank Krennrich and Andrey Kuznetsov and Jon Lapington and Francesco Licciulli and Serena Loporchio and Giovanni Marsella and Vincenzo Masone and Kevin Meagher and Thomas Meures and Brent A. W. Mode and Samuel A. I. Mognet and Reshmi Mukherjee and Akira Okumura and Francesca R. Pantaleo and Riccardo Paoletti and Federico Di Pierro and Deivid Ribeiro and Luca Riitano and Emmet Roache and Duncan Ross and Julien Rousselle and Andrea Rugliancich and Marcos Santander and Michael Schneider and Harm Schoorlemmer and Ruo-Yu Shang and Brandon Stevenson and Leonardo Stiaccini and Hiroyasu Tajima and Leslie P. Taylor and Julian Thornhill and Luca Tosti and Giovanni Tripodo and Valerio Vagelli and Massimo Valentino and Justin Vandenbroucke and Vladimir V. Vassiliev and Scott P. Wakely and Jason J. Watson and Richard White and Patrick Wilcox and David A. Williams and Matthew Wood and Peter Yu and Adrian Zink},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.08169},
year = {2022}
}