New Galactic Star Clusters Discovered in the VVV Survey
  VISTA Variables in the V\'{\i}a L\'actea (VVV) is one of the six ESO Public
Surveys operating on the new 4-meter Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for
Astronomy (VISTA). VVV is scanning the Milky Way bulge and an adjacent section
of the disk, where star formation activity is high. One of the principal goals
of the VVV Survey is to find new star clusters of different ages. In order to
trace the early epochs of star cluster formation we concentrated our search in
the directions to those of known star formation regions, masers, radio, and
infrared sources. The disk area covered by VVV was visually inspected using the
pipeline processed and calibrated $K_{\rm S}$-band tile images for stellar
overdensities. Subsequently, we examined the composite $JHK_{\rm S}$ and
$ZJK_{\rm S}$ color images of each candidate. PSF photometry of $15\times15$
arcmin fields centered on the candidates was then performed on the Cambridge
Astronomy Survey Unit reduced images. After statistical field-star
decontamination, color-magnitude and color-color diagrams were constructed and
analyzed. We report the discovery of 96 new infrared open clusters and stellar
groups. Most of the new cluster candidates are faint and compact (with small
angular sizes), highly reddened, and younger than 5\,Myr. For relatively well
populated cluster candidates we derived their fundamental parameters such as
reddening, distance, and age by fitting the solar-metallicity Padova isochrones
to the color-magnitude diagrams.
