An Era Comes to an End: The Legacy of LABOCA at APEX

Abstract

and the Hubble Deep Field (Smail et al., 1997; Hughes et al., 1998). Its main limitation was the small field of view and further progress was only possible by increasing the bolometer array sizes by an order of magnitude. This motivated the bolometer development group led by Ernst Kreysa at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn (MPIfR), who had already provided the community with MAMBO, SIMBA and its line of predecessors, to build LABOCA (Siringo et al., 2009) for the new Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) 12-m submillimetre telescope as one of its main facility instruments (Güsten et al., 2006). With as many as 295 bolometers covering a circular field of 11.4 arcminutes, LABOCA would remain the largest submillimetre array till the SCUBA-2 instrument became available on the JCMT in 2012 (Holland et al., 2013). Being installed on APEX, LABOCA could also make optimal use of the excellent weather conditions on Chajnantor, where the 870-μm atmospheric window is observable for almost two-thirds of the available weather conditions (Otarola et al., 2019). In addition, seeing the same sky as ALMA optimised LABOCA’s synergy as the ideal source finder for ALMA. Andreas Lundgren1 Carlos De Breuck1 Giorgio Siringo1 Axel Weiß2 Claudio Agurto1 Francisco Azagra1 Arnaud Belloche2 Michael Dumke1 Carlos Durán1 Andreas Eckart2 Edouard González1 Rolf Güsten2 Alvaro Hacar3 Attila Kovács 4 Ernst Kreysa2 Felipe Mac-Auliffe1 Mauricio Martínez1 Karl M. Menten2 Francisco Montenegro1 Lars-Åke Nyman1 Rodrigo Parra1 Juan Pablo Pérez-Beaupuits1 Vincent Reveret5, 6 Christophe Risacher7 Frédéric Schuller8 Thomas Stanke1 Karl Torstensson1 Paulina Venegas1 Helmut Wiesemeyer2 Friedrich Wyrowski2