Neural Network Identification of Halo White Dwarfs

The white dwarf luminosity function has proven to be an excellent tool tostudy some properties of the galactic disk such as its age and the past historyof the local star formation rate. The existence of an observational luminosityfunction for halo white dwarfs could provide valuable information about itsage, the time that the star formation rate lasted, and could also constrain theshape of the allowed Initial Mass Functions (IMF). However, the main problem isthe scarce number of white dwarfs already identified as halo stars. In thisLetter we show how an artificial intelligence algorithm can be succesfully usedto classify the population of spectroscopically identified white dwarfsallowing us to identify several potential halo white dwarfs and to improve thesignificance of its luminosity function.Comment: 15 pages, 3 postscript figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ Letters, uses aasms4.st