ALMA obs. of massive clouds in the CMZ

To study gas fragmentation, we use the dendrogram method to identify cores as traced by the dust continuum emission. The four clouds exhibit different fragmentation states at the observed resolution despite having similar masses at the cloud scale (~1-5pc).

Assuming a constant dust temperature of 20K, we construct core mass functions of the clouds and find a slightly top-heavy shape as compared to the canonical initial mass function, but we note several significant uncertainties that may affect this result. The characteristic spatial separation between the cores as identified by the minimum spanning tree method, ~10^4^au, and the characteristic core mass, 1-7M_{sun}_, are consistent with predictions of thermal Jeans fragmentation.