US Community Access to the Large Millimeter Telescope

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Astronomical observations of celestial sources at millimeter wavelengths address a broad range of important scientific questions. The United States has an active community of astronomers with strong interests in pursuing this research, creating a need for access to world-class telescopes for millimeter-wave astronomy. This project will provide the US community with open access to 15% of the scientific observing time on a 50m-diameter, millimeter-wave telescope: the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano (LMT). The LMT was constructed in a collaboration between the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the country of Mexico, who shared the capital cost of building the telescope and currently share in the scientific use of the facility. US astronomer access to comparable facilities, located elsewhere in the world, has been extremely limited, so access to the LMT provides a significant new opportunity for work in diverse areas such as studies of galactic evolution, time variable objects, and the formation of stars in the Milky Way and other nearby galaxies. LMT is a project carried out in a binational collaboration with the country of Mexico, and the opportunities presented by open access to the telescope are expected to boost scientific contact and collaborations between the United States and its southern neighbor. In addition, the educational institutions involved in the program, University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Maryland College Park, and the Instituto Nacional de Astrofisica, Optica, y Electronica in Mexico, have strong traditions of engaging students and training the next generation of scientists through hands-on work and direct participation in the project.The primary objective of this program is to provide 15% of the scientific observing time on the LMT to the US Community. Projects will be selected for observing time based on the results of an open, peer-reviewed, proposal competition. Observations for open access projects will be carried out by trained LMT observers and data products will be provided to open access users of the facility. The LMT has state-of-the-art instruments operating in the atmospheric windows between wavelengths of 4 mm and 0.85 mm and has the largest single-dish effective area in the world in the ALMA Bands 4-6. The new TolTEC instrument, a multi-wavelength continuum camera and polarimeter with 7,000 pixels, will complete surveys of the sky thousands of times faster than ALMA. Spectral line mapping surveys will also be obtained with surface brightness sensitivity and speeds exceeding ALMA capabilities, and unbiased spectroscopic surveys of molecular gas in the high redshift universe will be conducted. The LMT presents opportunities to carry out both “stand alone” science as well as playing an important complementary role to ALMA by providing data sets that will enhance the scientific return from ALMA for the US Community.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.