CARMA observations of massive Planck-discovered cluster candidates at z ≳ 0.5 associated with WISE overdensities: strategy, observations and validation

We present 1-2 arcmin spatial resolution Combined Array for Research in Millimetre-wave Astronomy (CARMA)-8 31 GHz observations towards 19 unconfirmed Planck cluster candidates, selected to have significant galaxy overdensities from the WISE early data release and thought to be at z greater than or similar to 1 from the WISE colours of the putative brightest cluster galaxy. We find a Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) detection in the CARMA-8 data towards nine candidate clusters, where one detection is considered tentative. For each cluster candidate we present CARMA-8 maps, a study of their radio-source environment and we assess the reliability of the SZ detection. The CARMA SZ detections appear to be SZ bright, with the mean, primary-beam-corrected peak flux density of the decrement being -2.9 mJy beam(-1) with a standard deviation of 0.8, and are typically offset from the Planck position by approximate to 80 arcsec. Using archival imaging data in the vicinity of the CARMA SZ centroids, we present evidence that one cluster matches Abell 586 - a known z approximate to 0.2 cluster; four candidate clusters are likely to have 0.3 less than or similar to z less than or similar to 0.7; and, for the remaining four, the redshift information is inconclusive. We also argue that the sensitivity limits resulting from the cross-correlation between Planck and WISE makes it challenging to use our selection criterion to identify clusters at z > 1.