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 (>= 8 degrees) field-of-view observations simultaneously with superior imaging of atmospheric cascades (resolution of 0.067 degrees 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.