Verification of the Optical System of the 9.7-m Prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope

For the first time in the history of ground-based $gamma$-ray astronomy, the on-axis performance of the dual mirror, aspheric, aplanatic Schwarzschild-Couder optical system has been demonstrated in a $9.7$-m aperture imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescope. The novel design of the prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope (pSCT) is motivated by the need of the next-generation Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) observatory to have the ability to perform wide ($geq 8^{circ}$) field-of-view observations simultaneously with superior imaging of atmospheric cascades (resolution of $0.067^{circ}$ per pixel or better). The pSCT design, if implemented in the CTA installation, has the potential to improve significantly both the $gamma$-ray angular resolution and the off-axis sensitivity of the observatory, reaching nearly the theoretical limit of the technique and thereby making a major impact on the CTA observatory sky survey programs, follow-up observations of multi-messenger transients with poorly known initial localization, as well as on the spatially resolved spectroscopic studies of extended $gamma$-ray sources. This contribution reports on the initial alignment procedures and point-spread-function results for the challenging segmented aspheric primary and secondary mirrors of the pSCT.