Download or read book Instrumentation and Commissioning of the Prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope Camera written by Leslie Paige Taylor and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Very high energy (VHE) astrophysical gamma rays can interact with the Earth's atmosphere, triggering a cascade of electromagnetic particles which will fall as a group toward Earth. These shower constituents move faster than the speed of light in air. Analogous to aircraft which produce a sonic boom when traveling faster than the speed of sound, the charged particles in this shower will emit blue wavelength photons known as Cherenkov radiation which can be detected from the ground. The imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescope (IACT) technique uses large optical telescopes and high-resolution cameras to image this Cherenkov light. Images of gamma-initiated showers can then be used to reconstruct the energy and direction of the initial gamma ray. The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is the next-generation world-wide gamma ray observatory. CTA will consist of two sites, one in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern hemisphere, and three IACT sizes: small, medium, and large. Together these sites will cover an energy range of 20 GeV - 300 TeV and have an order of magnitude greater sensitivity than current instruments. The Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope (SCT) is a candidate for the CTA medium sized telescope. The SCT utilizes novel dual-mirror Schwarzschild-Couder (SC) optics enabling a wide (8 degree) field of view and excellent optical performance. The small plate scale of SC optics allow for a compact camera design with modest weight, volume, cost and power consumption. The SCT camera uses Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs) as photosensors to achieve a finely-pixelated focal plane with 11,328 channels. The camera electronics are based on custom TARGET (TeV array readout with GSa/s sampling and event trigger) application specific integrated circuits and can sample incoming signals at a gigasample per second. A prototype SCT (pSCT) has been constructed at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, located in southern Arizona. This thesis will detail the instrumentation and commissioning of the pSCT camera. Optimization of the TARGET 7 initialization parameters is presented including the resulting improvements in waveform readout. Installation and initial commissioning of the camera was completed between May 2018 and January 2020. This process is described and a detailed description of the pSCT camera is given. After initial commissioning was completed observing procedures were established and used for the first time during observations of the Crab Nebula between January 18, 2020 and February 26, 2020. This campaign of observations resulted in the detection of gamma-ray emission from the Crab Nebula with a significance of 8.6 sigma. These observing procedures and other onsite operations required during observing are outlined here. A comprehensive confirmation of the channel mapping used in both the data and trigger pathways of the pSCT camera is given. Further confirmation of this mapping is established via SiPM current measurement. This method was also used to calculate the pointing corrections used during observations of the Crab Nebula.