Layout design studies for medium-sized telescopes within the Cherenkov Telescope Array

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the layout and design of medium-sized telescopes in the Cherenkov Telescope Array affect its gamma-ray detection performance, using Monte Carlo simulations of different telescope configurations.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of medium-sized telescope layouts and their impact on CTA performance, considering different optical designs.

Findings

Layout and design significantly influence CTA sensitivity.

Schwarzschild-Couder telescopes offer improved performance over Davies-Cotton.

Optimized configurations enhance energy coverage and detection capabilities.

Abstract

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is an international project for a next-generation ground-based gamma-ray observatory. CTA, conceived as an array of tens of imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes, comprising small, medium and large-size telescopes, is aiming to improve on the sensitivity of current-generation experiments by an order of magnitude and provide energy coverage from 20 GeV to more than 300 TeV. In this study we explore how the medium-sized telescopes layout design and composition impacts the overall CTA performance by analyzing Monte Carlo simulations including Davies-Cotton and Schwarzschild-Couder medium-sized telescopes.