IR STIG Seminar

An Update on the Leighton Chajnantor Telescope

Sunil Golwala (California Institute of Technology)

The Leighton Chajnantor Telescope (LCT) will be a new facility for submillimeter and millimeter astronomy and cosmology. It will explore a new frontier in the transient astro-nomical sky at these wavelengths via unparalleled spectral coverage and flexibility to focus on transient alerts. It will enable new probes of the hot gas in galaxy clusters and the circumgalactic medium and tomography in [CII] and CO from Cosmic Noon out to the Epoch of Reionization. LCT will undertake new surveys to study the role of and nature of dust in environments ranging from planetary and stellar nurseries in our own galaxy to galaxies at cosmological distances. Critical to these new capabilities will be a suite of instruments building on cutting-edge technologies including multiband focal planes, single-chip spectrometers, and quantum-limited amplifier arrays. LCT will redeploy the 10m Leighton Telescope of the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory — the highest accuracy submm telescope that currently exists — to Cerro Toco in Chile, with first light planned for 2027. I will discuss the science planned for LCT, the instrumentation that will enable it, and the current status of the project.

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