Detection of the Crab Nebula with the 9.7 m Prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope

Abstract

The Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope (SCT) is a telescope concept proposed for the Cherenkov Telescope Array. It employs a dual-mirror optical design to remove comatic aberrations over an $8^{\circ }$ field of view, and a high-density silicon photomultiplier camera (with a pixel resolution of 4 arcmin) to record Cherenkov emission from cosmic ray and gamma-ray initiated particle cascades in the atmosphere. The prototype SCT (pSCT), comprising a 9.7 m diameter primary mirror and a partially instrumented camera with 1536 pixels, has been constructed at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory. The telescope was inaugurated in January 2019, with commissioning continuing throughout 2019. We describe the first campaign of observations with the pSCT, conducted in January and February of 2020, and demonstrate the detection of gamma-ray emission from the Crab Nebula with a statistical significance of $8.6\sigma$.

13 pages, 12 figures, 3 tables, submitted to Astroparticle Physics

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• The development of ground-based Gamma-ray astronomy: a historical overview of the pioneering experiments
• Mirror production for the Cherenkov telescopes of the ASTRI Mini-Array and of the MST project for the Cherenkov Telescope Array
• Design and performance of the prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope camera
• CTC and CT5TEA: an advanced multi-channel digitizer and trigger ASIC for imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes
• Performance of the upgraded VERITAS Stellar Intensity Interferometer (VSII)
• How to detect gamma-rays from ground: an introduction to the detection concepts
• Monitoring the pointing of the prototype LST-1 using star reconstruction in the Cherenkov camera
• Projected sensitivity of CTAO to axion-like particles from blazars with a machine learning approach
• Evaluation of the effective mirror area of CTA Small-Sized Telescopes for camera design and Monte Carlo simulation
• Development of a blue-mirror multilayer coating on light concentrators for future SiPM cameras