Dear colleagues,

The Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) is the world’s most sensitive facility for millimeter/submillimeter astronomical observations, and will soon be fully operational in all of the originally planned bands.  Since its first observations, ALMA has routinely delivered groundbreaking scientific results that span nearly all areas of astrophysics.  Only future instrumentation upgrades and improvements can help ALMA continue as the field leader along this path!

The vision for ALMA's future development is described in the ALMA Development Roadmap (https://www.almaobservatory.org/en/publications/the-alma-development-roadmap/). In order to implement this vision a series of three workshops has been envisioned, in conjunction with corresponding working groups defining the appropriate scientific and technical specifications. Following the first two workshops held in 2020 to discuss potential correlator (http://www.cvent.com/events/the-alma2030-vision-design-considerations-for-the-next-alma-correlator/event-summary-8c936ac86f8a4e51842644ae58e2d315.aspx) and digitizer (https://alma-intweb.mtk.nao.ac.jp/~diono/meetings/ALMA2030_Mitaka/) upgrades that will realize the ALMA 2030 vision, we plan to complete the workshop trilogy with an ALMA Front-End Development Workshop, entitled “The ALMA 2030 Vision: A next generation of front-end receivers”. This workshop will be held online, in the week of September 27-30, 2021.

This workshop is intended to be relatively small and focused, but we explicitly welcome participation from all ALMA regions and the rest of the world. Registration and abstract submission will open at the end of March. Please distribute this message to interested colleagues and within your institutes as appropriate.  Further information will be included in the 2nd announcement, and will also be made available on the meeting website (https://www.eso.org/sci/meetings/2021/ALMAFED2021.html).
Please note: The website is currently under construction, and registration will open later this month.  The Front-End working group report, which is currently in Revision B (i.e. not the final form), is available here: https://science.nrao.edu/facilities/alma/science_sustainability/ALMA_FE_Digitizer_WG_report_released.pdf.  This report, which we encourage you to read, will likely be updated as the results from other development groups in ALMA are taken into consideration.
Best regards,
Tony Mroczkowski, Ciska Kemper and Carlos De Breuck, on behalf of SOC and LOC