APRICOT WP8: Quarterly Report #2 \\
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1) Science at Q-band meeting (Manchester 14/15 September 2009):
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A workshop which brought together both senior and junior people from around the world to discuss interferometers EVLA, ALMA (potential of Band-1),ATCA and single dishes: GBT, Mopra, mm-wave and APRICOT plans. It was partly supported from FP7 RadioNet Science meetings fund (Tiziana Venturi)

The presentations from the workshop are available at:

http://www.alma.ac.uk/documents/science-at-q-band

A summary in the context of APRICOT - the meeting:

1) Confirmed that exploiting all the 33-50 GHz RF band simultaneously is necessary - a 17GHz instantaneous bandwidth is very innovative and opens up many science applications. This goes well beyond what other telescopes/receiver combinations make available (8 GHz bandwidth) and matches with the request for sensitivity (continuum) and capability to observe many spectral lines at the same time.

2) Confirmed that the “magic number” for continuum sub-bands is 8.

3) Confirmed that new science wants all the observables (continuum + spectroscopy/spectropolarimetry) combined with all the observing time savings from the multiple pixels. This confirms that an ALL PURPOSE receiver is very timely.

4) Confirmed that if we want to avoid switching schemes for the receiver in order to overcome 1/f effects and weather, we need a very well developed observing strategy. This includes fast data acquisiton systems together with fast telescope motion.

5) Confirmed that the APRICOT specification for crosspolarization seems acceptable (we stated 30dB), although noting that a maximum limit of 5% (= 26dB) is difficult to obtain using circular pol at the band edge if we have 30dB in the central part.

6) The linear linear/circular polarisation choice remains to be made inside APRICOT.

2) Comment on effect of slow funding:

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All aspects of the project are being affected by this delay. But it is particularly hitting hard the development of novel hardware - hence

i) MMIC design and procurement from European foundries Fraunfofer and OMMIC (task 3)
2) MIC design for closer to the quantum limit (task 3)
3) testing all the above (task 4)
3) Innovative passive components (task 2)
4) implementation of actual test pixels (task 1 and 2)

However the additional the software simulations effort, identified as vital in the previous section (task 5), is also severely slowed down.

All the above need the funded people to really get going

Peter WIlkinson
APRICOT coordinator
24 Sept 2009