Welcome to the European ALMA Regional Centre Newsletter!
This monthly newsletter is a compilation of recent European ALMA Regional Centre news and announcements and announces upcoming ALMA and ALMA-related meetings. In the "Meet the ARC" section, the work of ARC personnel and the services and expertise areas of an ARC node are highlighted. You can also connect with the European ALMA Regional Centre via social media!
The start of antenna relocations between configuration C-8 and C-7, originally scheduled for October 20th, will be delayed until at least November 10th. Following recent inspections, it was found that both antenna transporters need urgent maintenance. ALMA has thus decided to take both transporters out of operation to proceed with the necessary repairs, to prevent a longer-term stoppage of antenna relocations. This situation will have an impact on the remaining Cycle 10 configuration calendar. As far as possible, ALMA will take mitigation actions to ensure that the observing queue is populated. A further announcement will be posted on the Science Portal once the technical issues have been solved and the specific impact on the configuration schedule has been established. We regret any inconvenience or impact experienced by our ALMA users due to this issue. If you have any questions, or have comments or concerns, please contact your local ALMA Regional Centre via the ALMA Helpdesk at https://help.almascience.org/.
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.
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.
Michiel Hogerheijde has been involved with ALMA and the ARC nodes for over 2 decades. He has led the Allegro ARC node in the Netherlands since the very first activities in 2009. Nowadays, Allegro has grown to mature expertise group with four postdocs, supervised by a program manager, Violette Impellizzeri. Michiel still provides the overall leadership and guides Allegro’s development, together with Violette. Michiel has also served in the past on the ESAC and ASAC advisory committees. In the days before ALMA, Michiel actively worked with millimeter interferometers in Owens Valley and Hat Creek, both in California.
Michiel’s research focuses on planet forming disks. He is an avid user of ALMA to probe the cold dust and gas across these disks. To dive into the inner disks on scales of a few au or less, he also uses the MATISSE instrument on the VLT Interferometer, which operates at infrared wavelengths between 3.2 and 13 µm.
Dr. Rhys Taylor
Rhys joined the Czech ARC node in Prague in 2016. His roles for the ARC involve providing user support, software testing, and promoting ALMA in local workshops. He was previously a postdoc at Arecibo Observatory and completed his PhD in Cardiff University in 2010.
Rhys' main research interest is in how galaxy evolution is affected by environment, especially the processes that drive gas loss, and in understanding how some gas clouds avoid forming stars. He is also actively involved in designing new methods of data visualisation.
Upcoming ALMA or ALMA-related meetings
UK ALMA 2024 Hybrid Workshop
This workshop will provide an introduction to ALMA and instructions on how to work with data from the observatory and will include sessions on preparing proposals, downloading data from the ALMA archive, calibrating and imaging ALMA data, and using advanced ALMA-related tools.
The workshop will be conducted in a hybrid format with participants having the option of either attending the workshop in person at the University of Manchester or joining online. More details will be provided later. While the workshop is aimed primarily at novice ALMA users, particularly from the United Kingdom, other users with higher levels of experience or from other locations are also welcome to attend.
The workshop will take place from 19-21 February 2024 and registration will close on 15 December 2023. For more information about the workshop, see the workshop's webpage at
Views on the multi-phase interstellar medium in galaxies
This international conference will focus on the latest developments in the theory of the ISM, state-of-the-art numerical studies, and most recent observational results from JWST, ALMA and other facilities, to investigate the interplay between the ISM, star formation, and black holes in the life of galaxies from the local Universe to the highest redshifts.
The conference will take place on 9-13 September 2024 in Bologna, Italy, in the historical venue of Aula Prodi, within one of the oldest universities in the world. The conference is a natural follow-up of the ALMABO19 event we held in 2019.
