Radio imaging of the Subaru/XMM-Newton Deep Field - III. Evolution of
  the radio luminosity function beyond z=1
  We present spectroscopic and eleven-band photometric redshifts for galaxies
in the 100-uJy Subaru/XMM-Newton Deep Field radio source sample. We find good
agreement between our redshift distribution and that predicted by the SKA
Simulated Skies project. We find no correlation between K-band magnitude and
radio flux, but show that sources with 1.4-GHz flux densities below ~1mJy are
fainter in the near-infrared than brighter radio sources at the same redshift,
and we discuss the implications of this result for spectroscopically-incomplete
samples where the K-z relation has been used to estimate redshifts. We use the
infrared--radio correlation to separate our sample into radio-loud and
radio-quiet objects and show that only radio-loud hosts have spectral energy
distributions consistent with predominantly old stellar populations, although
the fraction of objects displaying such properties is a decreasing function of
radio luminosity. We calculate the 1.4-GHz radio luminosity function (RLF) in
redshift bins to z=4 and find that the space density of radio sources increases
with lookback time to z~2, with a more rapid increase for more powerful
sources. We demonstrate that radio-loud and radio-quiet sources of the same
radio luminosity evolve very differently. Radio-quiet sources display strong
evolution to z~2 while radio-loud AGNs below the break in the radio luminosity
function evolve more modestly and show hints of a decline in their space
density at z>1, with this decline occurring later for lower-luminosity objects.
If the radio luminosities of these sources are a function of their black hole
spins then slowly-rotating black holes must have a plentiful fuel supply for
longer, perhaps because they have yet to encounter the major merger that will
spin them up and use the remaining gas in a major burst of star formation.
