Simulated Submillimetre Galaxy Surveys

Current submillimetre surveys are hindered in their ability to reveal detailed information on the epoch of galaxy formation and the evolutionary history of a high-redshift starburst galaxy population. The difficulties are due to the small primary apertures (D < 15-m) of existing submil-limetre telescopes and the limited sensitivities of their first generation of bolometer cameras. This situation is changing rapidly due to a variety of powerful new ground-based, airborne and satellite FIR to millimetre wavelength facilities. Improving our understanding of the luminosity and clustering evolution provides the motivation for conducting cosmological submillimetre and millimetre surveys. It is therefore important that we quantify the limitations of the future surveys and the significance of the results that can be drawn from them. In this paper we present simulated surveys which are made as realistic as possible in order to address some key issues confronting existing and forthcoming surveys. We discuss the results from simulations with a range of wavelengths (200µm – 1.1 mm), spatial resolutions (6 ′′ – 27 ′′) and flux densities (0.01–310 mJy). We address how the measured source-counts could be affected by resolution and confusion, by the survey sensitivity and noise, and by the sampling variance due to clustering and shot-noise.