‘The ALMA Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade’: first announcement of a workshop on the most ambitious upgrade of ALMA since its conception

Published: 25 Oct 2023
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This is the first announcement of the workshop 'The promise and challenges of the ALMA Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade' to take place at ESO - Garching from June 24 to 28, 2024. This upgrade constitutes the top priority of the ALMA 2030 roadmap. It consists of an increase of the instantaneous spectral bandwidth by as much as a factor of four, while retaining full spectral resolution over the entire bandwidth, thus resulting in increases of the spectral scan speed up to a factor of 50 for the highest spectral resolution. In addition, an upgrade of the full signal chain of ALMA – from the receivers and digitizers, all the way through to the correlated data – will result in increases in sensitivity for all observations. 

The aim of this workshop is to widely present the upgrade and engage the community by showcasing the science that will be enabled in the upcoming years. At the same time, we will also solicit input from the ALMA community that will be used to inform priorities during the commissioning phase. The call for abstract and registration will open on December 15.