Quasars as probes of the submillimetre cosmos at z > 5 - I. Preliminary SCUBA photometry

We present submillimetre (submm) continuum observations of a sample of some of the highest redshift quasars currently known, made with the Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array (SCUBA) on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT). 12 of the sample have redshifts z > 5 and two have z 6; the median redshift of the sample is 5.3. Two of the z > 5 objects are strong (6 ) detections, and are bright sources with S 850 m > 10 mJy. Another firm (5 ) detection is obtained for the z = 5.7 quasar SDSS J1044-0125; SDSS J1306+0356, at z = 6.0, is detected with a signal-to-noise ratio 4. We have obtained sensitive ( 1.5 mJy) upper limits for much of the remainder of the sample, including the z = 6.3 quasar SDSS J1030+0524.