The VMC Survey - XII. Star cluster candidates in the Large Magellanic
  Cloud
  In this work we analyse Colour-Magnitude Diagrams (CMDs) of catalogued star
clusters located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), from a YJKs photometric
data set obtained by the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy
(VISTA) survey of the Magellanic Clouds system (VMC). We studied a total of 98
objects of small angular size, typically ~ 11.6 pc in diameter projected
towards both uncrowded tile LMC 8_8 and crowded tile LMC 5_5. They populate
relatively crowded LMC fields with significant fluctuations in the stellar
density, the luminosity function, and the colour distribution as well as
uncrowded fields. This cluster sample is aimed at actually probing our
performance in reaching the CMD features of clusters with different ages in
crowded/uncrowded fields. We applied a subtraction procedure to statistically
clean the cluster CMDs from field star contamination. We then matched
theoretical isochrones to the background-subtracted CMDs to determine the ages
and metallicities of the clusters. We estimated the ages of 65 clusters, which
resulted to be in the age range 7.3 < log(t/yr) < 9.55. We also classified as
chance grouping of stars 19 previoulsy catalogued clusters, two possible
cluster-like asterisms, and one unresolved cluster. For other 8 objects, we
could not find a clear star concentration in the Ks images either, so we quoted
them as cluster-like asterisms. Finally, we found two previously catalogued
single star clusters to be unresolved background galaxies (KMHK747, OGLE366),
and one to be a triple cluster system (BSDL 2144).
