Structural studies of eight bright rimmed clouds in the southern
  hemisphere
  We carried out deep and wide-field near- and mid-infrared observations for a
sample of 8 bright-rimmed clouds (BRCs). Supplemented with the $Spitzer$
archival data, we have identified and classified 44 to 433 young stellar
objects (YSOs) associated with these BRCs. The Class I sources are generally
located towards the places with higher extinction and are relatively closer to
each other than the Class II sources, confirming that the young protostars are
usually found in regions having denser molecular material. On the other hand
the comparatively older population, Class II objects, are more randomly found
throughout the regions, which can be due to their dynamical evolution. Using
the minimal sampling tree analyses, we have extracted 13 stellar cores of 8 or
more members, which contains 60\% of the total YSOs. The typical core is
$\sim$0.6 pc in radii and somewhat elongated (aspect ratio of 1.45), of
relatively low stellar density (surface density 60 pc$^{-2}$), consisting of a
small (35) number of YSOs of relatively young sources (66\% Class I ), and
partially embedded (median $A_K$ =1.1 mag). But the cores show a wide range in
their mass distribution ($\sim$20 to 2400 M$_\odot$) with a median value of
around 130 M$_\odot$. We have found the star formation efficiencies in the
cores to be between 3\% and 30\% with an average of $\sim$14\%, which agree
with the efficiencies needed to link the core mass function to the initial mass
function. We also found a linear relation between the density of the clouds and
the number of YSOs. The peaked nearest neighbor spacing distributions of the
YSOs and the ratio of Jeans lengths to the YSOs separations indicates a
significant degree of non-thermally driven fragmentation in these BRCs.
