Distance to three molecular clouds in the central molecular zone
  The determination of absolute and relative distances of molecular clouds
along the line-of-sight towards the central molecular zone (CMZ) is crucial to
infer its orbital structure, dynamics, and to understand star formation in the
clouds. Recent results by Zoccali et al. 2021 suggest that the G0.253 + 0.016
cloud (the Brick) does not belong to the CMZ. This motivated us to cross check
their results computing the absolute and relative distance to the Brick and
also to other two molecular clouds (the 50 km/s, and the 20 km/s clouds), and
discuss their CMZ membership. We used the colour magnitude diagrams $K_s$ vs.
$H-K_s$ to compare stars detected towards the target clouds with stars detected
towards three reference regions in the nuclear stellar disc (NSD) and the
Galactic bulge. We used red clump (RC) stars to estimate the distance to each
region. We obtained that all the clouds present a double RC feature. Such a
double RC has been reported in previous work for the NSD, but not for the bulge
adjacent to it. We exclude the possibility that the different RC features are
located at significantly different distances. The obtained absolute and
relative distances are compatible with the Galactic centre distance ($\sim8$
kpc).
