Identification of Herschel sources using MeerKAT

High-redshift protoclusters consisting of dusty starbursts has been found to play an important role in galaxy evolution and cluster formation. Their dusty nature makes them difficult to discover in optical/NIR surveys, thus methods utilising Planck and Herschel FIR/submm data to search for them have been developed. However, the large beamsizes of FIR/submm data bring difficulties in determining the exact locations of these dusty galaxies for optical/NIR identification. Radio observations are an excellent way to obtain precise positions of dusty starbursts, as dust is transparent to radio emission and there is a known correlation between the FIR and radio emission of a galaxy. We present MeerKAT 1.28GHz radio imaging of 3 candidate protoclusters selected from Herschel & Planck data. We match our 1.28GHz sources to the H-ATLAS DR2 catalogues using a 7.5'' matching radius giving ~95% of Herschel sources in the fields a 1.28GHz counterpart. We investigate the FIR-radio correlation by calculating the monochromatic q250um, which is found to be 2.33 +/- 0.26. The Herschel SPIRE colours of our sources indicate that most have redshifts 2-3. We also explore the multiplicity of Herschel sources in our 1.28GHz observations. The 250um flux distributions of Herschel sources with and without multiple MeerKAT counterparts are found to be statistically different. Lastly, we demonstrate that accurate positions of Herschel sources obtained by MeerKAT observations will allow the cross-identification of these Herschel sources in optical/NIR data.