Future extragalactic sub-millimetre and millimetre surveys have the potential
to provide a sensitive census of the level of obscured star formation in
galaxies at all redshifts. While in general there is good agreement between the
source counts from existing SCUBA (850um) and MAMBO (1.25mm) surveys of
different depths and areas, it remains difficult to determine the redshift
distribution and bolometric luminosities of the sub-millimetre and millimetre
galaxy population. This is principally due to the ambiguity in identifying an
individual sub-millimetre source with its optical, IR or radio counterpart
which, in turn, prevents a confident measurement of the spectroscopic redshift.
Additionally, the lack of data measuring the rest-frame FIR spectral peak of
the sub-millimetre galaxies gives rise to poor constraints on their rest-frame
FIR luminosities and star formation rates. In this paper we describe
Monte-Carlo simulations of ground-based, balloon-borne and satellite
sub-millimetre surveys that demonstrate how the rest-frame FIR-sub-millimetre
spectral energy distributions (250-850um) can be used to derive photometric
redshifts with an r.m.s accuracy of +/- 0.4 over the range 0 < z < 6. This
opportunity to break the redshift deadlock will provide an estimate of the
global star formation history for luminous optically-obscured galaxies [L(FIR)
> 3 x 10^12 Lsun] with an accuracy of 20 per cent.Comment: 14 pages, 22 figures, submitted to MNRAS, replaced with accepted
versio