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

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The Dark Energy Survey Collaboration is building the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), a 3 square degree, 520 Megapixel CCD camera which will be mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at CTIO. DECam will be used to perform the 5000 sq. deg. Dark Energy Survey with 30% of the telescope time over a 5 year period. During the remainder of the time, and after the survey, DECam will be available as a community instrument. Construction of DECam is well underway. Integration and testing of the major system components has already begun at Fermilab and the collaborating institutions.

Abstract.A novel hadron calorimeter is being developed for future lepton colliding beam detectors. The calorimeter is optimized for the application of Particle Flow Algorithms (PFAs) to the measurement of hadronic jets and features a very finely segmented readout with 1 × 1 cm 2 cells. The active media of the calorimeter are Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs) with a digital, i.e. one-bit, readout. To first order the energy of incident particles in this calorimeter is reconstructed as being proportional to the number of pads with a signal over a given threshold. A large-scale prototype calorimeter with approximately 500,000 readout channels has been built and underwent extensive testing in the Fermilab and CERN test beams. This paper reports on the design, construction, and commissioning of this prototype calorimeter.