Abstract

ALMA crucially reveals the properties of the gas inside and surrounding galaxies from low to very dense environments. I expand on two techniques that take the efficiency of ALMA (and other interferometers) to its extreme; 1. ensuring robust spectroscopic redshifts with minimum observation time and 2. providing hyper-efficient snapshot observations of spectral lines. I provide a method to determine the quality of redshift identifications and use this to optimize future observations to robustly identify redshifts through multiple lines. This simple method enables twice as efficient observations as previous band 3 redshift studies. Meanwhile, large line survey observations require re-tuning, leading to overheads that fundamentally limit ALMA’s spectroscopic capabilities to several tens of sources per project. Instead, I explore a method to use fixed spectral windows that include as many lines as possible. We successfully target 85 lines within just 6 hours of observation time; a five-time improvement compared to existing line surveys. This method can be extended to improve the science output of any future continuum snapshots of sources.