The accretion history of high-mass stars: An ArT\'eMiS pilot study of
  Infrared Dark Clouds
  The mass growth of protostars is a central element to the determination of
fundamental stellar population properties such as the initial mass function.
Constraining the accretion history of individual protostars is therefore an
important aspect of star formation research. The goal of the study presented
here is to determine whether high-mass (proto)stars gain their mass from a
compact (<0.1pc) fixed-mass reservoir of gas, often referred to as dense cores,
in which they are embedded, or whether the mass growth of high-mass stars is
governed by the dynamical evolution of the parsec-scale clump that typically
surrounds them. To achieve this goal, we performed a 350micron continuum
mapping of 11 infrared dark clouds, along side some of their neighbouring
clumps, with the ArT\'eMiS camera on APEX. By identifying about 200 compact
ArT\'eMiS sources, and matching them with Herschel Hi-GAL 70micron sources, we
have been able to produce mass vs. temperature diagrams. We compare the nature
(i.e. starless or protostellar) and location of the ArT\'eMiS sources in these
diagrams with modelled evolutionary tracks of both core-fed and clump-fed
accretion scenarios. We argue that the latter provide a better agreement with
the observed distribution of high-mass star-forming cores. However, a robust
and definitive conclusion on the question of the accretion history of high-mass
stars requires larger number statistics.
