ALMA REGIONAL CENTRE

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This proposal is for funding of the UK node of the European ALMA Regional Centre, which will provide the UK ALMA community with direct user support, training and specialized software for experiment design, scheduling, data analysis and astrophysical interpretation. The Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA) is currently being constructed in northern Chile by a global consortium involving 17 nations. ALMA will revolutionise astronomy in the millimetre and sub-millimetre band with angular resolution, sensitivity, imaging quality and spectral coverage orders of magnitude beyond what is available today. The range of scientific applications is very broad, stretching from comets to cosmology, but the ALMA's key strength will be detailed imaging of the processes of star and planet formation in our own galaxy and in the universe at large, directly addressing many of the key themes of STFC's astronomical vision. The operating plan for ALMA devolves all user interaction and support to three regional centres (ARCs) in US, Japan and Europe. While the US and Japanese centres will be large and monolithic, the European model is a distributed one, with proposal handling and basic data provision based at ESO in Garching and all face-to-face user support and more advanced data analysis facilities provided by individual nodes funded at the national level. The largest of these nodes are expected to be at IRAM (Grenoble) and in the UK, building on their expertise in sub-mm, mm and cm-wavelength astronomy and interferometry. The UK ARC node therefore offers an excellent opportunity to enable the UK community to make the best possible use of ALMA, by providing the facilities and support required. We aim to bring together experience from the established single dish mm/sub-mm community with interferometric expertise from the MERLIN/VLBI National Facility as well as UK teams already involved in developing key subsystems (archive, observing tool, calibration system) This proposal presents a work plan and staffing structure to establish a dedicated support unit for the UK ALMA community, which will be hosted in purpose-designed offices in a new building of the University of Manchester's School of Physics and Astronomy. Development and support effort will also be based at Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh. The UK ARC node will provide training, documentation and one-to-one support for every aspect of using ALMA including feasibility studies of large and small projects, proposal submission, observation scheduling, data analysis for standard and non-standard projects, quality assurance feedback and data interpretation. Specialised simulation software will be developed for optimizing experiment design and evaluating image quality. Data reduction techniques for large and complex projects will be developed in response to specific UK needs. We request funding to establish and operate the UK node of the ALMA Regional Centre. The Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA), currently being built in Chile, is the most complex and ambitious ground-based observatory ever built and through our ESO membership, the UK can expect to obtain approximately 10% of the total observing time for a substantial UK user community. The UK ARC node will educate, develop and support UK astronomers to make the best scientific use of ALMA in all areas from planetary science to cosmology. ALMA will be a complex instrument to use and the majority of UK users will be unfamiliar with the techniques of observing, calibration, imaging and interpretation for a millimetre interferometer .