A search for wide brown dwarf companions to stars within 10pc

We present the first results of a large imaging survey to identify wide brown dwarf companions to stars within 10 pc. We have performed a deep (H-band limit ~ 19.0 mag), wide field (up to 16x16 arcmin) astrometric imaging campaign in two epochs around more than 230 nearby stars. Preliminary results show that the wide low-mass companion fraction is far lower than expected, indicating that interactions with the galactic disk may have removed the weakly bound wide companions around old stars.