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In this work, we aim to characterize high-mass clumps with infall motions. We selected 327 clumps from the Millimetre Astronomy Legacy Team 90-GHz survey, and identified 100 infall candidates. Combined with the results of He et al., we obtained a sample of 732 high-mass clumps, including 231 massive infall candidates and 501 clumps where infall is not detected. Objects in our sample were classified as pre-stellar, proto-stellar, HII or photodissociation region (PDR). The detection rates of the infall candidates in the pre-stellar, proto-stellar, HII and PDR stages are 41.2 per cent, 36.6 per cent, 30.6 per cent and 12.7 per cent, respectively. The infall candidates have a higher H2 column density and volume density compared with the clumps where infall is not detected at every stage. For the infall candidates, the median values of the infall rates at the pre-stellar, proto-stellar, HII and PDR stages are 2.6 × 10-3, 7.0 × 10-3, 6.5 × 10-3 and 5.5 × 10-3 M☉ yr-1, respectively. These values indicate that infall candidates at later evolutionary stages are still accumulating material efficiently. It is interesting to find that both infall candidates and clumps where infall is not detected show a clear trend of increasing mass from the pre-stellar to proto-stellar, and to the HII stages. The power indices of the clump mass function are 2.04 ± 0.16 and 2.17 ± 0.31 for the infall candidates and clumps where infall is not detected, respectively, which agree well with the power index of the stellar initial mass function (2.35) and the cold Planck cores (2.0). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Massive star-forming regions with observed infall motions are good sites for studying the birth of massive stars. In this paper, 405 compact sources have been extracted from the APEX Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy (ATLASGAL) compact sources that also have been observed in the Millimetre Astronomy Legacy Team 90-GHz (MALT90) survey during years 1 and 2. These observations are complemented with Spitzer GLIMPSE/MIPSGAL mid-IR survey data to help classify the elected star-forming clumps into three evolutionary stages: pre-stellar, proto-stellar and UCHII regions. The results suggest that 0.05 g cm-2 is a reliable empirical lower bound for the clump surface densities required for massive-star formation to occur. The optically thick HCO+(1-0) and HNC(1-0) lines, as well as the optically thin N2H+(1-0) line were used to search for infall motions towards these sources. By analysing the asymmetries of the optically thick HCO+(1-0) and HNC(1-0) lines and the mapping observations of HCO+(1-0), a total of 131 reliable infall candidates have been identified. The HCO+(1-0) line shows the highest occurrence of obvious asymmetric features, suggesting that it may be a better infall motion tracer than other lines such as HNC(1-0). The detection rates of infall candidates towards pre-stellar, proto-stellar and UCHII clumps are 0.3452, 0.3861 and 0.2152, respectively. The relatively high detection rate of infall candidates towards UCHII clumps indicates that many UCHII regions are still accreting matter. The peak column densities and masses of the infall candidates, in general, display an increasing trend with progressing evolutionary stages. However, the rough estimates of the mass infall rate show no obvious variation with evolutionary stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]