Towards the construction of a medium size prototype Schwarzschild-Couder telescope for CTA

The construction of a prototype Schwarzschild-Couder telescope (pSCT) started in early June 2015 at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Southern Arizona, as a candidate medium-sized telescope for the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). Compared to current Davies-Cotton telescopes, this novel instrument with an aplanatic two-mirror optical system will offer a wider field-of-view and improved angular resolution. In addition, the reduced plate scale of the camera allows the use of highly-integrated photon detectors such as silicon photo multipliers. As part of CTA, this design has the potential to greatly improve the performance of the next generation ground-based observatory for very high-energy (E>60 GeV) gamma-ray astronomy. In this contribution we present the design and performance of both optical and alignment systems of the pSCT.