The ALMA Telescope

Abstract

The Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) is an interferometer array of 54 12-m and 12 7-m antennas, operating in the atmospheric windows from 31 to 950 GHz. The cryogenic receivers for 10 bands employ SIS mixers and low-noise amplifiers. The aggregate data at a rate of 6.3 Tbit/s are processed in real time to yield cross-correlation functions used to construct mm/submm wavelength images with spatial resolution finer than the Hubble Space Telescope produces at optical wavelengths.