Invited Presentation

An Introduction to the ALMA Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade (WSU)

Author(s): Jennifer Donovan Meyer (NRAO/North American ALMA Development Team), on behalf of the ALMA Collaboration

Presenter: Jennifer Donovan meyer (National Radio Astronomy Observatory)

I will give an overview of the ambitious ALMA Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade being undertaken by the ALMA Partnership to keep the Observatory at the forefront of scientific discovery. In particular, I will describe the ALMA 2030 Development Roadmap priorities, the upgrades to the entire system required to realize the WSU, the current status of the hardware, the proposed implementation milestones, and major program reviews that the WSU will undergo in the second half of 2025. Further, I will explain the benefits of the WSU for users with regard to the upgraded receiver bandwidth, correlated bandwidth, and observing speed of ALMA. Finally, I will briefly illustrate a handful of scientific use cases which will see great improvements in efficiency after the realization of the WSU.