The European ALMA Regional Centre network is organising the first European ALMA School that will be hosted by the UK ARC Node on 10 - 14 June 2024 in Manchester. This school is designed to provide training on a broad range of aspects related to ALMA, including interferometry, data calibration and imaging, the ALMA archive, analysis techniques, ALMA science, and future ALMA developments. For more details and registration please visit the meeting website: https://sites.google.com/view/eu-alma-school-2024. The deadline for registration is 31 December 2023.

A new development study, led by the Nederlandse Onderzoekschool Voor Astronomie (NOVA) in Groningen, aims to produce a refurbished ALMA Band 9 cold cartridge receiver compatible with the ALMA Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade (WSU) requirements. The study will improve several key components. First, the receiver will be upgraded from a double sideband (DSB) to a sideband separating (2SB) configuration to improve sensitivity by suppressing image sideband sky noise. This requires a much more complicated mixer assembly, as well as a doubling of the number of SIS mixer devices and new cryogenic low-noise IF amplifiers. Second, the IF bandwidth will be extended, aiming for the WSU goal of 16 GHz per sideband. Third, the polarization performance will be improved either by improving the alignment of the existing grids or by the implementation of an orthomode transducer.

Allegro announces that on November 27th it will host a CASA training with hands-on component at Leiden Observatory. More details on the registration will be shared via the Allegro Newsletter and will be posted on its website: https://www.alma-allegro.nl.

As previously announced in the October 2022 EU ARC Newsletter, the ALMA partnership is organizing a conference to commemorate its first decade of science operations. The conference will take a look back at the observatory accomplishments, highlight its latest results and look forward to future technical developments. The programme is now available at the conference website.

This is a reminder that registration for online attendance to the conference is available at the conference website with a deadline for registration on the 1st of November 2023.

The European ARC CalMS service (https://almascience.eso.org/tools/eu-arc-network/the-european-arc-calms-service) will be unavailable from 16 - 30 October 2023.

On September 25th, 2023, representatives of the ESO ALMA development study program and the European Science Advisory Committee (ESAC) met at the University of Manchester (UoM) with researchers from both UoM's Advanced Radio Instrumentation Group and the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL), kicking off a key ALMA study aiming to provide more integrated and scalable approaches to building the low noise amplifiers and mixers at the heart of ALMA receivers. 

The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) is offering a postdoctoral fellowship position to join the ALMA science operations group in Santiago, Chile. The goal of this fellowship is to offer young scientists the opportunity to enhance their research programs through involvement in science activities and interactions with experienced staff at the world's foremost observatory for sub-mm astronomy. The application deadline is 31/10/2023.

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) invites applications for the ESO Fellowship Programme 2023/2024. The Programme is designed to help early career scientists to develop their independent research programmes and successfully reach the next step of their scientific careers. The application deadlines are 15/10/2023 for the ESO-Chile and ESO-Germany Fellowship Programmes, respectively.

ALMA is releasing data acquired as part of the Extension and Optimisation of Capabilities effort (EOC). These data were taken as part of the High-Frequency Long-Baseline Campaign (HF-LBC-2021) during Cycle 7, which was organised to test the calibration and imaging capability of ALMA at high-frequencies (397 - 908 GHz, Band 8-10) and using long baselines (~16 km).

One main priority was to make a final validation of the band-to-band (B2B) phase referencing observation mode in Bands 8, 9, and 10. This technique allows the calibration of high-frequency observations by using a phase calibrator observed at a lower frequency, e.g. pairing Band 10 target observations with a Band 7 phase calibrator.