25 March: Mark Booth

Speaker: Mark Booth (Royal Observatory, Edinburgh)

Date: Wednesday 25 March 2026

Time: 15:00

Location: Physics 3.21 Berry

Designing the Largest Sub-mm Single Dish Facility in the World

Sub-mm and mm wavelengths provide a unique view of the Universe, from the gas and dust that fills and surrounds galaxies to the chromosphere of our own Sun. Current single-dish facilities have presented a tantalising view of the brightest (sub-)mm sources, and interferometers have provided the exquisite resolution necessary to analyse the details in small fields, but there are still many open questions that cannot be answered with current facilities. What is needed now is a facility capable of rapidly mapping the sky spatially, spectrally, and temporally, which can only be done by a high throughput, single-dish observatory. The Atacama Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (AtLAST) aims to be a sustainable, upgradeable, multipurpose facility that will deliver orders of magnitude increases in sensitivity and mapping speeds over current and planned sub-mm telescopes. With its 50m dish and 2 degree field of view, the strength of AtLAST is in science where a large field of view, highly multiplexed instrumentation and sensitivity to faint large-scale structure is crucial. In this talk I will describe the main aspects of the telescope, the key science drivers and the next steps for the project.