Design and Performance of the Prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope Camera

TL;DR

This paper describes the design, construction, and initial performance of the prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope camera, highlighting its novel dual mirror optics, silicon photomultiplier detectors, and electronic systems for gamma-ray astronomy.

Contribution

It introduces a new telescope camera design with advanced optics and electronics, and reports on its current status and initial observations.

Findings

Prototype camera successfully demonstrated initial functionality.

Electronics and detector systems operate as intended.

Upcoming upgrade will significantly increase field of view and pixel count.

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$^{\circ}$ 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$^{\circ}$. Here we give a detailed description of the pSCT camera, including the basic concept, mechanical design, detectors, electronics, current status and first light.