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We present the design and the status of procurement of the optical system ofthe prototype Schwarzschild-Couder telescope (pSCT), for which construction isscheduled to begin in fall at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in southernArizona, USA. The Schwarzschild-Couder telescope is a candidate for themedium-sized telescopes of the Cherenkov Telescope Array, which utilizesimaging atmospheric Cherenkov techniques to observe gamma rays in the energyrange of 60Gev-60TeV. The pSCT novel aplanatic optical system is made of twosegmented aspheric mirrors. The primary mirror has 48 mirror panels with anaperture of 9.6 m, while the secondary, made of 24 panels, has an diameter of5.4 m. The resulting point spread function (PSF) is required to be better than4 arcmin within a field of view of 6.4 degrees (80% of the field of view),which corresponds to a physical size of 6.4 mm on the focal plane. This goalrepresents a challenge for the inexpensive fabrication of aspheric mirrorpanels and for the precise alignment of the optical system as well as for therigidity of the optical support structure. In this submission we introduce thedesign of the Schwarzschild-Couder optical system and describe the solutionsadopted for the manufacturing of the mirror panels and their integration withthe optical support structure.

Construction of a Schwarzschild-Couder telescope as a candidate for the Cherenkov Telescope Array: status of the optical system