The massive star initial mass function of the Arches cluster
  The massive Arches cluster near the Galactic center should be an ideal
laboratory for investigating massive star formation under extreme conditions.
But it comes at a high price: the cluster is hidden behind several tens of
magnitudes of visual extinction. Severe crowding requires space or AO-assisted
instruments to resolve the stellar populations, and even with the best
instruments interpreting the data is far from direct. Several investigations
using NICMOS and the most advanced AO imagers on the ground revealed an overall
top-heavy IMF for the cluster, with a very flat IMF near the center. There are
several effects, however, that could potentially bias these results, in
particular the strong differential extinction and the problem of transforming
the observations into a standard photometric system in the presence of strong
reddening. We present new observations obtained with the NAOS-Conica (NACO)
AO-imager on the VLT. The problem of photometric transformation is avoided by
working in the natural photometric system of NACO, and we use a Bayesian
approach to determine masses and reddenings from the broad-band IR colors. A
global value of $\Gamma=-1.1 \pm 0.2$ for the high-mass end ($M>10M_{\sun}$) of
the IMF is obtained, and we conclude that a power law of Salpeter slope cannot
be discarded for the Arches cluster. The flattening of the IMF towards the
center is confirmed, but is less severe than previously thought. We find
$\Gamma=-0.88\pm0.20$, which is incompatible with previous determinations.
Within 0.4 pc we derive a total mass of $\sim2.0(\pm0.6)\times10^{4}M_{\sun}$
for the cluster and a central mass density $\rho = 2(\pm0.4)\times10^{5}
M_{\sun}pc^{-3}$ that confirms Arches as the densest known young massive
cluster in the Milky Way.
