Towards a fully consistent Milky Way disc model - III. Constraining the
  initial mass function
  We use our vertical Milky Way disc model together with Galaxia to create mock
observations of stellar samples in the solar neighbourhood. We compare these to
the corresponding volume complete observational samples of dereddened and
binary accounted data from Hipparcos and the Catalogue of Nearby Stars.
Sampling the likelihood in the parameter space we determine a new fiducial IMF
considering constraints from dwarf and giant stars. The resulting IMF
observationally backed in the range from 0.5 to 10 Msun is a two slope broken
power law with -1.49 +- 0.08 for the low mass slope, a break at 1.39 +- 0.05
Msun and a high mass slope of -3.02 +- 0.06. The Besancon group also converging
to a similar IMF even though their observational sample being quite different
to ours shows that the forward modelling technique is a powerful diagnostic to
test theoretical concepts like the local field star IMF.
