Oscillating red giants observed during Campaign 1 of the Kepler K2
  mission: New prospects for galactic archaeology
  NASA's re-purposed Kepler mission -- dubbed K2 -- has brought new scientific
opportunities that were not anticipated for the original Kepler mission. One
science goal that makes optimal use of K2's capabilities, in particular its
360-degree ecliptic field of view, is galactic archaeology -- the study of the
evolution of the Galaxy from the fossil stellar record. The thrust of this
research is to exploit high-precision, time-resolved photometry from K2 in
order to detect oscillations in red giant stars. This asteroseismic information
can provide estimates of stellar radius (hence distance), mass and age of vast
numbers of stars across the Galaxy. Here we present the initial analysis of a
subset of red giants, observed towards the North Galactic Gap, during the
mission's first full science campaign. We investigate the feasibility of using
K2 data for detecting oscillations in red giants that span a range in apparent
magnitude and evolutionary state (hence intrinsic luminosity). We demonstrate
that oscillations are detectable for essentially all cool giants within the
$\log g$ range $\sim 1.9-3.2$. Our detection is complete down to
$\mathit{Kp}\sim 14.5$, which results in a seismic sample with little or no
detection bias. This sample is ideally suited to stellar population studies
that seek to investigate potential shortcomings of contemporary Galaxy models.
