Identifying clusters of red supergiants in Galactic plane using 2MASS and GAIA G band colors

Galactic young massive clusters are the ideal laboratories to study massive stellar evolution. Unfortunately, such objects are rare. Of particular interest are so-called Red Supergiant Clusters (RSGCs) that are currently only found toward the Scutum-Crux Galactic arm. Confirming their nature as RSGC is often not straight-fortward as distinguishing RSGs from AGB stars is still difficult even with high spectral resolution spectra. Here we report that broad band colors using 2MASS JHK and GAIA G band data can be useful in reducing the AGB contamination, thus providing selection criteria that effectively reveal the known RSGCs with negligible false positives. On the other hand, we suggest that RSGC4, one of the proposed RSGC candidates, may not be a cluster of RSGs as their colors are not compatible with our selection criteria. We discuss the nature of these stars together with our IGRINS spectroscopic observations. We also employ the same selection criteria to search for RSGC candidates in other parts of the plane, resulting in no prominent candidates.