A new development study, led by the Cosmic DAWN Center (DAWN) at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU, Cophenhagen), started on 10 January 2024. The study aims to explore the feasibility and scientific impact of using focal plane arrays (FPAs) to improve the mapping speed of ALMA, while maintaining its exquisite spatial resolution.

ALMA is making the following information available to assist with early proposal planning for Cycle 11.

Key dates (anticipated) for Cycle 11:

• 21 March 2024: Release of the ALMA Cycle 11 Call for Proposals and Observing Tool, and opening of the archive for proposal submission
• 25 April 2024: Proposal submission deadline
• October 2024: Start of Cycle 11 observations, spanning 12 months

A new development study, led by the Group of Advanced Receiver Development (GARD, Chalmers University, Sweden) started on 19 December 2023. The study aims to improve the sensitivity of ALMA receivers by developing a new low-loss construction technique for the waveguide components. 

As previously announced, the workshop 'The promise and challenges of the ALMA Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade' will take place at ESO - Garching from the 24^th to the 28^th of June, 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. 

ALMA is pleased to announce that, following the successful repairs of ALMA transporter Otto, antenna relocations towards completing Configuration 7 started on November 25. In order to catch up with the original configuration calendar announced at the start of Cycle 10, almost continuous antenna relocations are envisaged up until December 28. As a consequence, the first visits to Configurations 6, 5, 4 and 3 will be shorter than originally planned. However, these configurations will be revisited later in the cycle.

The European ARC Network invites users to an introduction to Very Long Baseline Interferometry with ALMA (Part I) on January 19th, 11:00 CET [Zoom].

The ALMA Director, Sean Dougherty, would like to share the following statement on observatory priorities during implementation of the Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade (WSU).

Allegro announces its first Joint ALMA + JWST Science Day, which will take place at Kapteyn Institute in Groningen on 30 January 2024. The Science Day aims to bring together members of The Netherlands astronomy community where we highlight the latest scientific results obtained with ALMA and JWST, with a particular emphasis on projects that make use of both. The meeting will also allow ample time to discuss user experiences and will have talks on news and updates for both ALMA and JWST. Registration for contributed talks is now open (registration form, deadline: 8 January 2024).