The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is an international project for a next-generation ground-based gamma ray observatory, aiming to improve on the sensitivity of current-generation experiments by an order of magnitude and provide energy coverage from 30 GeV to more than 300 TeV. The 9.7m Schwarzschild-Couder (SC) candidate medium-size telescope for CTA exploits a novel aplanatic two-mirror optical design that provides a large field of view of 8 degrees and substantially improves the off-axis performance giving better angular resolution across all of the field of view with respect to single-mirror telescopes. The realization of the SC optical design implies the challenging production of large aspherical mirrors accompanied by a submillimeter-precision custom alignment system. In this contribution we report on the status of the implementation of the optical system on a prototype 9.7 m SC telescope located at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in southern Arizona.
@article{arxiv.1709.06324,
title = {Prototype 9.7 m Schwarzschild-Couder telescope for the Cherenkov Telescope Array: status of the optical system},
author = {D. Nieto and T. B. Humensky and P. Kaaret and D. Kieda and M. Limon and A. Petrashyk and D. Ribeiro and J. Rousselle and B. Stevenson and V. Vassiliev and P. Wilcox},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.06324},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
Proceedings of the 35th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC 2017), Busan, Korea. All CTA contributions at arXiv:1709.03483