OH Megamasers in the Early Universe: the IR Connection
Kyle Willett (CASA)

OH megamasers are 18-cm masers that are produced in the nuclear
regions (the inner ~100-kpc) of merging, IR-bright galaxies. Roughly
100 are known to exist, with the majority lying at z > 0.1. Megamasers
are unique due to their ability to serve as luminous signposts for the
environments in which they form, including bursts of extreme star
formation, coalescing galaxy groups, and nascent binary black
holes. By quantifying the relationship between the masers and the
galaxies they inhabit, they can be employed as tracers out to
cosmological distances. I will discuss recent observations of OHM host
galaxies from the Spitzer IR spectrograph and their relation to the
megamaser phenomenon; this forms a portion of a broader,
multi-wavelength project dedicated to the astrophysics of OHM
formation.