Welcome to ALMA and the European ALMA Regional Centre!

ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) is the world's largest ground-based facility for observations in the millimeter/submillimeter regime located on the Chajnantor plateau, 5000 meters altitude in northern Chile. It enables transformational research into the physics of the cold Universe, probes the first stars and galaxies, and directly images the formation of planets. ALMA comprises a giant array of fifty 12-m antennas, which can be configured to achieve baselines up to 16 km. It is equipped with state-of-the-art receivers that cover all the atmospheric windows up to 1 THz. In addition, a compact array of 7-m and 12-m antennas greatly enhance ALMA's ability to image extended sources.

The European ALMA Regional Centre (ARC) provides the interface between the ALMA project and the European science community. It supports its users mainly in the areas of proposal preparation, observation preparation, data reduction, and data analysis.

Below you can read the latest Announcements from the European ARC Network.. More details and up-to-date information can be found in the News section and the ALMA Science Portal.

European ALMA school

Published: 26 Sep 2023

The European ALMA Regional Centre network is organising an 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.

CalMS Service unavailable during European ARC cluster downtime

Published: 25 Sep 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.

Development study on integrated system on a chip low noise amplifiers kicks off

Published: 25 Sep 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. 

ALMA and ESO fellowship opportunities in Chile and Garching

Published: 25 Sep 2023

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.

Release of Band-to-Band High-Frequency Long-Baseline ALMA Test Data Taken in 2021

Published: 25 Sep 2023

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.

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