Deriving ages and horizontal branch properties of integrated stellar
  populations
  A major source of uncertainty in the age determination of old ($\sim10$ Gyr)
integrated stellar populations is the presence of hot horizontal branch (HB)
stars. Here, we describe a simple approach to tackle this problem, and show the
performance of this technique that simultaneously models the age, abundances
and HB properties of integrated stellar populations. For this we compare the
results found during the fits of the integrated spectra of a sample of stellar
population benchmarks, against the values obtained from the analysis of their
resolved CMDs. We find that the ages derived from our spectral fits for most
(26/32) of our targets are within 0.1 dex to their CMDs values. Similarly, for
the majority of the targets in our sample we are able to recover successfully
the flux contribution from hot HB stars (within $\sim0.15 {\rm ~dex}$ for 18/24
targets) and their mean temperature (14/24 targets within $\sim30 \%$).
Finally, we present a diagnostic that can be used to detect spurious solutions
in age, that will help identify the few cases when this method fails. These
results open a new window for the detailed study of globular clusters beyond
the Local Group.
