Status and results of the prototype LST of CTA

TL;DR

This paper reports on the development, commissioning, and initial performance results of the LST-1 telescope, a key component of the CTA designed for low-energy gamma-ray astronomy, highlighting its progress and early scientific findings.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive status update and performance evaluation of the LST-1 prototype, demonstrating its capabilities and initial scientific results.

Findings

LST-1 successfully commissioned in La Palma in 2018

Performance aligns with design expectations

First physics results obtained from the prototype

Abstract

The Large-Sized Telescopes (LSTs) of Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) are designed for gamma-ray studies focusing on low energy threshold, high flux sensitivity, rapid telescope repositioning speed and a large field of view. Once the CTA array is complete, the LSTs will be dominating the CTA performance between 20 GeV and 150 GeV. During most of the CTA Observatory construction phase, however, the LSTs will be dominating the array performance until several TeVs. In this presentation we report on the status of the LST-1 telescope inaugurated in La Palma, Canary islands, Spain in 2018. We show the progress of the telescope commissioning, compare the expectations with the achieved performance, and give a glance of the first physics results.