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NRAO/Socorro Colloquium Series

Sarah Church

Stanford

ARGUS: A 16-pixel W-bank array for the Green Bank Telescope


The ARGUS array is a 16-pixel array designed to carry out spectroscopy from 85-115.3 GHz that will be deployed at the Green Bank Telescope in late 2014. The array size matches the existing back-end capabilities of the GBT to reduce the cost and the technical and schedule risks associated with the project, but the Argus array concept is intended to be highly scalable, to serve as a prototype for much larger arrays with hundreds of elements. Once Argus is commissioned it will be used to conduct an astronomical investigation of gas in nearby galaxies and the Galactic center using observations of CO, as well as HCN, HCO+, CS, and their rarer isotopologues, and other dense gas tracers. Argus will use the latest generation of MMIC InP low noise amplifiers to achieve an estimated receiver noise temperature of 40K.In this talk I will describe the design of Argus and its science goals and give an update on the progress towards deployment. If time permits I will also discuss other potential applications of the MMIC technology that Argus employs, including experiments designed to use intensity mapping of highly redshifted CO emission to probe the Epoch of Reionizatio





September 13, 2013
11:00 am

Array Operations Center Auditorium

All NRAO employees are invited to attend via video, available in Charlottesville Room 230, Green Bank Room 137 and Tucson N525.

Local Host: Steve Durand

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