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Abstract

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) will use three telescope sizes to
efficiently detect cosmic gamma rays in the energy range from several tens of
GeV to hundreds of TeV. The Small-Sized Telescopes (SSTs) will form the largest
section of the array, covering an area of many square kilometres on the CTA
southern site in Paranal, Chile. Up to 70 SSTs will be implemented by an
international consortium of institutes and teams as an in-kind contribution to
the CTA Observatory. The SSTs will provide unprecedented sensitivity to gamma
rays above 1 TeV and the highest angular resolution of any instrument above the
hard X-ray band. CTA has recently finalised the technology that will be used
for the SSTs: the telescopes will be a dual-reflector design with a primary
reflector of ~4 m diameter, equipped with an SiPM-based camera with full
waveform readout from $\sim$2000 channels covering a $\sim$9$^\circ$ field of
view. The Schwarzschild-Couder optical configuration leads to a small
plate-scale, and consequently a compact, cost-efficient camera. In this
contribution, we describe the experience gained operating telescope and camera
prototypes during the CTA preparatory phase, and the development of the final
SST design.