Boosting the performance of the ASTRI SST-2M prototype: reflective and anti-reflective coatings

ASTRI is a Flagship Project of the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research, led by the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics, INAF. One of the main aims of the ASTRI Project is the design, construction and verification on-field of a dual mirror (2M) end-to-end prototype for the Small Size Telescope (SST) envisaged to become part of the Cherenkov Telescope Array. The ASTRI SST-2M prototype adopts the Schwarzschild-Couder design, and a camera based on SiPM (Silicon Photo Multiplier); it will be assembled at the INAF astronomical site of Serra La Nave on mount Etna (Catania, Italy) within mid 2014, and will start scientific validation phase soon after. The peculiarities of the optical design and of the SiPM bandpass pushed towards specifically optimized choices in terms of reflective coatings for both the primary and the secondary mirror. In particular, multi-layer dielectric coatings, capable of filtering out the large Night Sky Background contamination at wavelengths $\lambda \gtrsim 700$ nm have been developed and tested, as a solution for the primary mirrors. Due to the conformation of the ASTRI SST-2M camera, a reimaging system based on thin pyramidal light guides could be optionally integrated aiming to increase the fill factor. An anti-reflective coating optimized for a wide range of incident angles faraway from normality was specifically developed to enhance the UV-optical transparency of these elements. The issues, strategy, simulations and experimental results are thoroughly presented.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures. In Proceedings of the 33rd International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2013), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). All ASTRI contributions at arXiv:1307.463

The ASTRI SST-2M prototype for the Cherenkov Telescope Array: primary mirror characterization by deflectometry

In 2014 the ASTRI Collaboration, led by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, has constructed an end-to-end prototype of a dual-mirror imaging air Cherenkov telescope, proposed for the small size class of telescopes for the Cherenkov Telescope Array. The prototype, named ASTRI SST-2M, has been installed at the observing station located at Serra La Nave (Italy). In this project the Brera Astronomical Observatory was responsible for the production and the testing of the primary mirror. The ASTRI SST-2M telescope's primary mirror has an aperture of ~ 4 m, a polynomial design, and consists of 18 individual hexagonal facets. These characteristics require the production and testing of panels with a typical size of ~1 m vertex-to-vertex and with an aspheric component of up to several millimetres. The mirror segments were produced assembling a sandwich of thin glass foils bent at room temperature to reach the desired shape. For the characterization of the mirrors we developed an ad-hoc deflectometry facility that works as an inverse Ronchi test in combination with a ray-tracing code. In this contribution we report the results of the deflectometric measurements performed on the primary mirror segments of the ASTRI SST-2M dual mirror telescope. The expected point spread function and the contributions to the degradation of the image quality are studied