The Messenger Astronomical News
Report on the ESO workshop “The Promises and Challenges of the ALMA Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade”
No. 194 (March 2025), 41–43
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is undergoing the most ambitious project since its inauguration: the Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade (WSU). The WSU will increase the instantaneous 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 of 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 digitisers all the way through to the correlated data — will result in increases in sensitivity for all observations. However, the increased bandwidth and throughput bring several technical challenges. In June 2024, we organised the first conference at ESO in Garching to inform the ALMA community about all the details of this upgrade. Here we report on the outcome of this meeting.
Cite this article:
De Breuck, C., Díaz Trigo, M.; Report on the ESO workshop "The Promises and Challenges of the ALMA Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade". The Messenger 194 (March 2025): 41–43. https://doi.org/10.18727/0722-6691/5386