This is a reminder that the deadline for in-person registration on the 12th of May 2024 is approaching.

The workshop "The promises and challenges of the ALMA Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade" will take place at ESO - Garching from the 24th to the 28th of June, 2024. The aim of this workshop is to widely present the ALMA Wideband Sensitivity 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.

Oracle have reported a serious incompatibility between macOS Sonoma 14.4 and Java which may result in the OT terminating unexpectedly. Users are advised to update their operating systems to macOS Sonoma 14.4.1 which fixes this issue.

The European ARC Network invites users to an introduction to the ALMA Observing Tool on April 11th, 11:00 CEST [Zoom].

In the coming months, the Nordic ARC node is organising two events for their ALMA user community:

- Thursday April 4, 10:00 h, Proposal Preparation Day

- Wednesday June 5: Nordic ALMA Day

This is a reminder that the deadline for abstract submission [https://www.eso.org/sci/meetings/2024/wsu/abstract/submission-open.html] for contributed talks on the 1st of March 2024 is approaching.  

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. A description of the WSU technical capabilities and the science case motivating the upgrade and is available at Carpenter et al. 2022 [https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.00195].

The next Call for Proposals for observing time with ALMA (Cycle 11) will be issued in late March 2023. The deadline for proposals is expected to be on 25 April 2024, with observations starting in October 2024. As a kick-off into the proposal preparation season, the German ARC node cordially invites its community to gather for the German ALMA Community Day in Bonn on 25 March 2024.

Over the past 10 observational cycles, the ALMA Science Archive (ASA) has amassed an enormous volume of data. This extensive collection stands as a promising resource to the continual growth of archival science. With over 1.8PB of accumulated data and nearly 70,000 observations, the ASA now boasts extensive sky coverage in capturing a vast number of research topics (Fig. 1), offering researchers unparalleled opportunities for archival science. The worldwide astronomy community has an ever-growing opportunity to leverage ALMA's extensive archive for their research. Notably, 13% of all publications in Nature involve the use of archival data, with 9% relying exclusively on such data.