7.2. New telescopes

At present, a wide range of submm-wave telescopes are available. Single-antenna telescopes include the 10.4-m CSO on Mauna Kea, the 10-m Heinrich Hertz Telescope (HHT) on Mount Graham, the 15-m JCMT on Mauna Kea, the 15-m SEST at La Silla in Chile, the 30-m IRAM telescope in Spain, and the 45-m antenna at Nobeyama in Japan. The Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT), a 50-m mm-wave telescope is under construction on a 5000-m peak near Puebla in Mexico, and it is hoped that the 100-m Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia can operate at 90 GHz/3 mm during the winter. New single-antenna telescopes with large survey cameras have been proposed for the excellent submm observing sites at the South Pole and the ALMA site in Chile. The Planck Surveyor CMB imaging mission will generate an all-sky map in the submm at a resolution of 5 arcmin, and the 3.5-m Herschel space telescope will carry out pointed submm imaging and spectroscopic observations of known galaxies, and carry out deep confusion-limited cosmological surveys over fields several hundred square degrees in size. Cameras exploiting the 2.5-m telescope aboard SOFIA and BLAST and other dedicated ultra-long-duration balloon instruments will allow far-IR and submm-wave observations from the upper atmosphere.

Existing mm-wave interferometers include the 6 × 15-m IRAM PdBI, the 6 × 10.4-m OVRO MMA, the 10 × 6-m BIMA array at Hat Creek in California and the 6 × 10-m Nobeyama Millimeter Array. The 8 × 6-m SMA is under construction on Mauna Kea, the first imaging submm-wave interferometer, while it is planned to combine 9 of the BIMA antennas with the OVRO MMA at a high site in the Inyo Mountains east of Owens Valley in California to form CARMA. The international 64 × 12-m ALMA submm interferometer array in Chile will provide a tremendous increase in the capability of submm-wave spectral line and continuum imaging, providing 10- to 30-µarcsec resolution, and detailed images of even the most distant galaxies. The most luminous submm galaxies so far discovered, with 850-µm flux densities of about 25 mJy, could be detected at a 10- significance by ALMA in about a second. Its excellent sensitivity and wide 8-GHz instantaneous bandwidth will allow a significant fraction of the galaxies detected in deep surveys to be detected simultaneously in the continuum and CO rotation lines, providing direct and exact redshifts. As the redshifted ladder of CO lines are separated by 115 / (1 + z) GHz, about 25% of galaxies at z 2.5 will have a CO line lying within the 8-GHz-wide ALMA band (Blain et al., 2000b).