Optical Followup of Far-IR/Submm Surveys: From Spitzer and SCUBA to Herschel

Dave Clememnts, Markos Trichas, Michael Rowan-Robinson, Imperial
College London

Mattia Vaccari, Universita di Padova

The SWIRE, SHADES and HerMES Consortia

The Cosmic Infarred Background has shown that dust dominated galaxies
play an important role in the history of the universe. However, despite
major strides resulting from mid-to-far-IR and submm surveys, a full
understanding of this population requires followup observations in the
optical. This will be demonstrated using two test cases: GMOS optical
spectroscopy of SWIRE infrared sources and the use of Subaru SXDF data
for the identification and  photometric redshift estimation of SCUBA
submm sources. Finally the prospects for optical followup of Herschel
sources from the HerMES survey will be discussed.