New brown dwarf candidates in the Pleiades

We have performed deep, wide-field imaging on a ∼0.4 deg2 field in the Pleiades (Melotte 22). The selected field was not yet target of a deep search for low mass stars and brown dwarfs. Our limiting magnitudes are R ∼ 22 mag and I ∼ 20 mag, sufficient to detect brown dwarf candidates down to 40 MJ. We found 197 objects, whose location in the (I, R – I) color magnitude diagram is consistent with the age and the distance of the Pleiades. Using CTK R and I as well as JHK photometry from our data and the 2MASS survey we were able to identify 7 new brown dwarf candidates. We present our data reduction technique, which enables us to resample, calibrate, and co-add many images by just two steps. We estimate the interstellar extinction and the spectral type from our optical and the NIR data using a two-dimensional χ2 fitting (© 2009 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)