The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is a new observatory for very high-energy (VHE) gamma rays. CTA has ambitions science goals, for which it is necessary to achieve full-sky coverage, to improve the sensitivity by about an order of magnitude, to span about four decades of energy, from a few tens of GeV to above 100 TeV with enhanced angular and energy resolutions over existing VHE gamma-ray observatories. An international collaboration has formed with more than 1000 members from 27 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and North and South America. In 2010 the CTA Consortium completed a Design Study and started a three-year Preparatory Phase which leads to production readiness of CTA in 2014. In this paper we introduce the science goals and the concept of CTA, and provide an overview of the project. ?? 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Summary To assess the achievement of uniformity of radiobiological effectiveness at different depths in the proton spread-out Bragg peak (SOBP), Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells were exposed to 65-MeV modulated proton beams at the Research Center for Nuclear Physics (RCNP) of Osaka University. We selected four different irradiation positions: 2 mm depth, corresponding to the entrance, and 10, 18 and 23 mm depths, corresponding to different positions in the SOBP. Cell survival curves were generated with the in vitro colony formation method and fitted to the linear-quadratic model. With 137CS gamma-rays as the reference irradiation, the relative biological effectiveness (RBE) values for a surviving fraction (SF) level of 0.1 are 1.05, 1.10, 1.12 and 1.19 for depths of 2, 10, 18 and 23 mm respectively. A significant difference was found between the survival curves at 10 and 23 mm (P < 0.05), but not between 18 and 10 mm or between 18 and 23 mm. There was a significant dependence of RBE on depths in modulated proton beams at the 0.1 surviving fraction level (P< 0.05). Moreover, the rise of RBEs significantly depended on increasing SF level or decreased approximately in correspondence with irradiation dose (P = 0.0001). To maintain uniformity of radiobiological effectiveness for the target volume, careful attention should be paid to the influence of depth of beam and irradiation dose.Keywords: proton; spread-out Bragg peak; relative biological effectiveness; Chinese hamster ovary cellThe depth-dose curve for the single-energy proton beam has limited applications in clinical radiation therapy owing to the excessively narrow high-dose region. This region, also known as the Bragg peak, can be modulated by appropriate selection of a distribution of proton energies to produce a spread-out Bragg peak (SOBP) or a uniform region of full dose at the depth of interest. Dose uniformity across a target volume can be achieved with multiple X-ray beams. However, each X-ray beam features a greater dose in the entrance region than a corresponding proton beam, has a dose gradient across the target volume and delivers an undesirable dose to normal tissues distal to the target. Proton beams have none of these undesirable characteristics (Suit and Urie, 1992; Munzenrider and Crowell, 1994;Raju, 1996).Although SOBP produces an excellent physical dose distribution, there is a variation of linear energy transfer (LET) values at different depths in the SOBP, known as the LET gradient, from proximal to distal SOBP. The proton is a lower LET particle than other heavy-charged particles; for example, the mean LET values of the 65-MeV modulated proton beams (SOBP) are always less than 7 keV .m-' (Courdi et al, 1994).The achievement of uniformity of radiobiological effectiveness for target volumes is always a matter of concern. In fact, there is no uniformity of LET within target volumes. One study has suggested that DNA double-strand breaks, potentially lethal damage and sublethal damage, depend on LET and are closely

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The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is the next generation ground-based very high energy gamma-ray observatory. The Large-Sized Telescope (LST) of CTA targets 20 GeV -1 TeV gamma rays and has 1855 photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) installed in the focal plane camera. With the 23 m mirror dish, the night sky background (NSB) rate amounts to several hundreds MHz per pixel. In order to record clean images of gamma-ray showers with minimal NSB contamination, a fast sampling of the signal waveform is required so that the signal integration time can be as short as the Cherenkov light flash duration (a few ns). We have developed a readout board which samples waveforms of seven PMTs per board at a GHz rate. Since a GHz FADC has a high power consumption, leading to large heat dissipation, we adopted the analog memory ASIC "DRS4". The sampler has 1024 capacitors per channel and can sample the waveform at a GHz rate. Four channels of a chip are cascaded to obtain deeper sampling depth with 4096 capacitors. After a trigger is generated in a mezzanine on the board, the waveform stored in the capacitor array is subsequently digitized with a low speed (33 MHz) ADC and transferred via the FPGAbased Gigabit Ethernet to a data acquisition system. Both a low power consumption (2.64 W per channel) and high speed sampling with a bandwidth of >300 MHz have been achieved. In addition, in order to increase the dynamic range of the readout we adopted a two gain system achieving from 0.2 up to 2000 photoelectrons in total. We finalized the board design for the first LST and proceeded to mass production. Performance of produced boards are being checked with a series of quality control (QC) tests. We report the readout board specifications and QC results.