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The fragmentation of star-forming interstellar clouds, and the resultingstellar initial mass function (IMF), is strongly affected by the temperaturestructure of the collapsing gas. Since radiation feedback from embedded starscan modify this as collapse proceeds, feedback plays an important role indetermining the IMF. However, the effects and importance of radiative heatingare likely to depend strongly on the surface density of the collapsing clouds,which determines both their effectiveness at trapping radiation and theaccretion luminosities of the stars forming within them. In this paper wereport a suite of adaptive mesh refinement radiation-hydrodynamic simulationsusing the ORION code in which we isolate the effect of column density onfragmentation by following the collapse of clouds of varying column densitywhile holding the mass, initial density and velocity structure, and initialvirial ratio fixed. We find that radiation does not significantly modify theoverall star formation rate or efficiency, but that it suppresses fragmentationmore and more as cloud surface densities increase from those typical of lowmass star-forming regions like Taurus, through the typical surface density ofmassive star-forming clouds in the Galaxy, up to conditions found only in superstar clusters. In regions of low surface density, fragmentation during collapseleads to the formation of small clusters rather than individual massive starsystems, greatly reducing the fraction of the stellar population with masses >~10 Msun. Our simulations have important implications for the formation ofmassive stars and the universality of the IMF.

Radiation Feedback, Fragmentation, and the Environmental Dependence of the Initial Mass Function