The debut of a new detector has many “firsts”: the first assembly, the first shift, the first light, the first detection… But if there’s one thing that makes a debut official—sort of like a detector’s birth certificate—it’s the detailed description of how the detector was built and how it performs.
And this is achieved in a new paper by members of the Cherenkov Telescope Array Consortium, published in the Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments and Systems. The paper documents the design of the camera of the prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope (pSCT), a medium-sized candidate telescope for the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). The paper also includes performance metrics that show its potential as a very-high-energy gamma-ray detector and that have already been used to plan an upgrade, a project which is now well underway. Very high energy gamma rays are the highest energy photons in the universe and can unveil the physics of extreme objects, including black holes and possibly dark matter.
The pSCT uses novel dual-mirror optics, rather than more traditional single-mirror optics, and relies on high-speed electronics to cover CTA’s middle energy range from 80 GeV to 50TeV. This camera was developed by a team spanning multiple universities and co-led by UW–Madison physics professor Justin Vandenbroucke, who has been working on this project since 2009.