A Comprehensive Redshift Survey of the Brightest Herschel Galaxies – Z-GAL

The proposed three years ANR project will accompany and support, through an effective partnership, a Large Program of ~190 hours using the IRAM NOEMA interferometer. The aim of this project is to build a comprehensive redshift survey of the brightest sub-millimeter galaxies (SMGs) selected from Herschel and provide a sizeable and homogeneous sample of about 200 SMGs with reliable redshifts, to address the following science goals: i) increase the number of lensed SMGs with known redshifts at the peak of the cosmic star-formation rate density; ii) find rare objects, including hyper-luminous SMGs, and study their statistical properties; iii) enable follow-up observations of the lensed sources and derive the properties of the massive deflector dark matter haloes at z~0.5-1 and the large-scale structures they trace; iv) measure cosmological parameters (Omega_Lambda); and v) further explore the physical properties of these dusty luminous star-forming galaxies in the early universe.