What can the UK ARC provide?

The European ALMA Regional Centre (ARC) provides scientific user support to the ESO community. The European ARC is organized as a network of scientific support nodes coordinated from ESO Headquarters in Garching-bei-München. Face to face support is provided at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, Manchester, in the UK, and by nodes based in France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the Czech Republic and The Netherlands. The UK ARC Node is a collaboration between the Universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Manchester and Oxford plus the Rutherford Appletome Laboratory, and is supported by STFC. ESO will maintain a mirror of the ALMA Archive and (once operations are well established) astronomers will be able to retrieve pipeline-processed data cubes after their observations. The regional ARC nodes provide face-to-face support from initial proposal preparation through to ultimate data processing.

Science goals

The UK ARC can provide speakers for seminars or workshops at your institute, complementing the ongoing series of International and UK meetings stimulating interaction in the many fields which will benefit from ALMA, from solar system science and star formation to investigating cosmological constants.

M31 looks like this (above) now at 70 micron wavlength, but what was its high redshift ancestor like? Such systems , barely detected by the HST (Science archive, right) will be resolved by ALMA at 400 micron.

Proposal and observation preparation

We provide information and advice on how best to observe your targets with ALMA, using the available tools:

• Sensitivity calculator
• Simulation software
• Proposal preparation & observing tool

ALMA data reduction

Enhanced data processing

We provide assistance in interpretation and enhanced data processing, e.g. from datacube to intensity, spectra, velocity, velocity dispersion.... (example courtesy of Aalto & Hüttemeister 2000) A&A 262, 42)

The UK ARC node will run tutorials in the CASA data processing package and help visitors with installation and use of CASA. 

Archive Data

The ALMA archive will supply public domain data, whether to find calibration sources or  for science.  ARC node staff will assist with data mining and  support observers who wish to contribute advanced data products.

To go with your ALMA data...

JBCA is home to significant expertise in radio interferometry and the use of other complementary astronomical. It hosts the e-MERLIN/VLBI National Facility and the SKA development office and has local experts in JCMT, Spitzer, VLTI  and a wide range of other facilities.