Detection of the Crab Nebula with the 9.7 m Prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope

The Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope (SCT) is a telescope concept proposed for
the Cherenkov Telescope Array. It employs a dual-mirror optical design to
remove comatic aberrations over an $8^{\circ}$ field of view, and a
high-density silicon photomultiplier camera (with a pixel resolution of 4
arcmin) to record Cherenkov emission from cosmic ray and gamma-ray initiated
particle cascades in the atmosphere. The prototype SCT (pSCT), comprising a 9.7
m diameter primary mirror and a partially instrumented camera with 1536 pixels,
has been constructed at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory. The telescope
was inaugurated in January 2019, with commissioning continuing throughout 2019.
We describe the first campaign of observations with the pSCT, conducted in
January and February of 2020, and demonstrate the detection of gamma-ray
emission from the Crab Nebula with a statistical significance of $8.6\sigma$.