(Sub)millimetre interferometric imaging of a sample of COSMOS/AzTEC submillimetre galaxies

We investigate the environment of 23 submillimetre galaxies (SMGs) drawn from a signal-to-noise (S/N)-limited sample of SMGs originally discovered in the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT)/AzTEC 1.1 mm continuum survey of a Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS) subfield and then followed up with the Submillimetre Array and Plateau de Bure Interferometer at 890 mu m and 1.3 mm, respectively. These SMGs already have well-defined multiwavelength counterparts and redshifts. We also analyse the environments of four COSMOS SMGs spectroscopically confirmed to lie at redshifts z(spec) > 4 : 5, and one at z(spec) = 2 : 49 resulting in a total SMG sample size of 28. We search for overdensities using the COSMOS photometric redshifts based on over 30 UV-NIR photometric measurements including the new UltraVISTA data release 2 and Spitzer/SPLASH data, and reaching an accuracy of sigma(Delta z/(1+z)) = (1 + z) = 0 : 0067 (0 : 0155) at z 3.5). To identify overdensities we apply the Voronoi tessellation analysis, and estimate the redshift-space overdensity estimator delta(g) as a function of distance from the SMG and/or overdensity centre. We test and validate our approach via simulations, X-ray detected groups or clusters, and spectroscopic verifications using VUDS and zCOSMOS catalogues which show that even with photometric redshifts in the COSMOS field we can e ffi ciently retrieve overdensities out to z approximate to 5. Our results yield that 11 out of 23 (48%) JCMT/AzTEC 1.1 mm SMGs occupy overdense environments. Considering the entire JCMT/AzTEC 1.1 mm S = N >= 4 sample and taking the expected fraction of spurious detections into account, this means that 35-61% of the SMGs in the S/N-limited sample occupy overdense environments. We perform an X-ray stacking analysis in the 0.5-2 keV band using a 32 '' aperture and our SMG positions, and find statistically significant detections. For our z 2 subsample yields an average flux of (1.3 +/- 0.5) x 10(-16) erg s(-1) cm(-2) and a corresponding total mass of M-200 = 2 x 10(13) M-circle dot. Our results suggest a higher occurrence of SMGs occupying overdense environments at z >= 3 than at z