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Young massive clusters (YMCs) are the most compact, high-mass stellar systemsstill forming at the present day. The precursor clouds to such systems are,however, rare due to their large initial gas mass reservoirs and rapiddispersal timescales due to stellar feedback. Nonetheless, unlike their high-zcounterparts, these precursors are resolvable down to the sites of individuallyforming stars, and hence represent the ideal environments in which to test thecurrent theories of star and cluster formation. Using high angular resolution(1$^{\prime\prime}$ / 0.05pc) and sensitivity ALMA observations of two YMCprogenitor clouds in the Galactic Centre, we have identified a suite ofmolecular line transitions -- e.g. c-C$_{3}$H$_{2} $($7-6$) -- that arebelieved to be optically thin, and reliably trace the gas structure in thehighest density gas on star-forming core scales. We conduct a virial analysisof the identified core and proto-cluster regions, and show that half of thecores (5/10) and both proto-clusters are unstable to gravitational collapse.This is the first kinematic evidence of global gravitational collapse in YMCprecursor clouds at such an early evolutionary stage. The implications are thatif these clouds are to form YMCs, then they likely do so via the"conveyor-belt" mode, whereby stars continually form within dispersed dense gascores as the cloud undergoes global gravitational collapse. The concurrentcontraction of both the cluster-scale gas and embedded (proto)stars ultimatelyleads to the high (proto)stellar density in YMCs.

Young massive star cluster formation in the Galactic Centre is driven by global gravitational collapse of high-mass molecular clouds