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Subaru Seminars are usually held in Room 104 of the Hilo Base Facility, adjacent to the main lobby. Everyone is welcome to attend. If you would like to give a seminar, please contact Subaru seminar organizers (Thayne Currie, Tae-Soo Pyo, Nagayoshi Ohashi) by email : sseminar_at_subaru.naoj.org (please change"_at" to @).

November 2, Wednesday, 11 am in 104B

" Design and construction of a prototype Schwarzschild-Couder telescope for the Cherenkov Telescope Array "

Julien Rousselle

(UCLA)


The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) will be the next generation ground-based gamma-ray observatory for Very High Energy Astrophysics (VHE), designed to improve the sensitivity by an order of magnitude compared to current instruments. Built by a worldwide consortium of 29 countries, CTA will consist of two arrays, in La Palma (Spain) and Paranal (Chile), for a full sky coverage. Both arrays will be made of tens of Cherenkov telescopes of three different apertures to cover the energy range between 20 GeV and 300 TeV. The Schwarzschild-Couder telescope (SCT) is an innovative candidate for the CTA medium size telescopes (9.6 m aperture), featuring a two-mirror aplanatic optical system with a larger field of view (8 deg) and reduced plate-scale compared to traditional Davis-Cotton or parabolic designs. These improvements require a large (5 m) aspheric and highly curved secondary mirror as well as a sophisticated alignment system based on several hundred actuators and edge sensors. In this talk I will present the work done at UCLA to design and build the optical and alignment systems for SCT and some of the main technical challenges that have been overcome. I will also give a status update on the first full-size SCT prototype currently under construction at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Arizona.


Seminars are also held at JAC, CFHT, and IfA.



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