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In molecular simulations, the accurate treatment of long-range energy terms, such as van der Waals interactions, is crucial for reliable free energy calculations. Methods like force switching, potential switching, and potential shifting are commonly employed to smooth the truncation of these interactions at a specified cutoff distance, but their effects on free energy calculations are not well understood. In this study, we systematically explore the effects of these modifiers on the accuracy of free energy calculations using two model systems: Lennard-Jones spheres and a simplified anthracene in water. Our results reveal that the free energy of solvation using potential switching is essentially independent of cutoff, while force switching and potential shifting introduce errors as a function of cutoff significant enough to affect the utility of the calculations., Comment: 17 pages, 3 figures

Side-scan sonar (SSS) imagery presents unique challenges in the classification of man-made objects on the seafloor due to the complex and varied underwater environments. Historically, experts have manually interpreted SSS images, relying on conventional machine learning techniques with hand-crafted features. While Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) significantly advanced automated classification in this domain, they often fall short when dealing with diverse seafloor textures, such as rocky or ripple sand bottoms, where false positive rates may increase. Recently, Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown potential in addressing these limitations by utilizing a self-attention mechanism to capture global information in image patches, offering more flexibility in processing spatial hierarchies. This paper rigorously compares the performance of ViT models alongside commonly used CNN architectures, such as ResNet and ConvNext, for binary classification tasks in SSS imagery. The dataset encompasses diverse geographical seafloor types and is balanced between the presence and absence of man-made objects. ViT-based models exhibit superior classification performance across f1-score, precision, recall, and accuracy metrics, although at the cost of greater computational resources. CNNs, with their inductive biases, demonstrate better computational efficiency, making them suitable for deployment in resource-constrained environments like underwater vehicles. Future research directions include exploring self-supervised learning for ViTs and multi-modal fusion to further enhance performance in challenging underwater environments.

We present PhysioLLM, an interactive system that leverages large language models (LLMs) to provide personalized health understanding and exploration by integrating physiological data from wearables with contextual information. Unlike commercial health apps for wearables, our system offers a comprehensive statistical analysis component that discovers correlations and trends in user data, allowing users to ask questions in natural language and receive generated personalized insights, and guides them to develop actionable goals. As a case study, we focus on improving sleep quality, given its measurability through physiological data and its importance to general well-being. Through a user study with 24 Fitbit watch users, we demonstrate that PhysioLLM outperforms both the Fitbit App alone and a generic LLM chatbot in facilitating a deeper, personalized understanding of health data and supporting actionable steps toward personal health goals.

We present new catalogs of likely globular clusters (GCs) in 17 nearby spiral galaxies studied as part of the PHANGS-HST Treasury Survey. The galaxies were imaged in five broad-band filters from the near-ultraviolet through the $I$ band. PHANGS-HST has produced catalogs of stellar clusters of all ages by selecting extended sources (from multiple concentration index measurements) followed by morphological classification (centrally concentrated and symmetric or asymmetric, multiple peaks, contaminant) by visually examining the V-band image and separately by a machine-learning algorithm which classified larger samples to reach fainter limits. From both cluster catalogs, we select an initial list of candidate GCs to have $B-V \geq 0.5$ and $V-I \geq 0.73$~mag, then remove likely contaminants (including reddened young clusters, background galaxies misclassified by the neural network, and chance superpositions/blends of stars) after a careful visual inspection. We find that $\approx86$ % of the color-selected candidates classified as spherically symmetric, and $\approx68$ of those classified as centrally concentrated but asymmetric are likely to be GCs. The luminosity functions of the GC candidates in 2 of our 17 galaxies, NGC 628 and NGC 3627, are atypical, and continue to rise at least 1~mag fainter than the expected turnover near $M_V \sim -7.4$. These faint candidate GCs have more extended spatial distributions than their bright counterparts, and may reside in the disk rather than the bulge/halo, similar to faint GCs previously discovered in M101. These faint clusters may be somewhat younger since the age-metallicity degeneracy makes it difficult to determine precise cluster ages from integrated colors once they reach $\approx1$~Gyr., Comment: 21 pages, 12 figures

We present the largest catalog to-date of star clusters and compact associations in nearby galaxies. We have performed a V-band-selected census of clusters across the 38 spiral galaxies of the PHANGS-HST Treasury Survey, and measured integrated, aperture-corrected NUV-U-B-V-I photometry. This work has resulted in uniform catalogs that contain $\sim$20,000 clusters and compact associations which have passed human inspection and morphological classification, and a larger sample of $\sim$100,000 classified by neural network models. Here, we report on the observed properties of these samples, and demonstrate that tremendous insight can be gained from just the observed properties of clusters, even in the absence of their transformation into physical quantities. In particular, we show the utility of the UBVI color-color diagram, and the three principal features revealed by the PHANGS-HST cluster sample: the young cluster locus, the middle-age plume, and the old globular cluster clump. We present an atlas of maps of the 2D spatial distribution of clusters and compact associations in the context of the molecular clouds from PHANGS-ALMA. We explore new ways of understanding this large dataset in a multi-scale context by bringing together once-separate techniques for the characterization of clusters (color-color diagrams and spatial distributions) and their parent galaxies (galaxy morphology and location relative to the galaxy main sequence). A companion paper presents the physical properties: ages, masses, and dust reddenings derived using improved spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting techniques., Comment: 48 pages, 26 figures, article in review at APJ

We study young massive clusters (YMCs) in their embedded "infant" phase with $\sim0.\!^{\prime\prime}1$ ALMA, HST, and JWST observations targeting the central starburst ring in NGC 3351, a nearby Milky Way analog galaxy. Our new ALMA data reveal 18 bright and compact (sub-)millimeter continuum sources, of which 8 have counterparts in JWST images and only 6 have counterparts in HST images. Based on the ALMA continuum and molecular line data, as well as ancillary measurements for the HST and JWST counterparts, we identify 14 sources as infant star clusters with high stellar and/or gas masses (${\sim}10^5\;\mathrm{M_\odot}$), small radii (${\lesssim}\,5\;\mathrm{pc}$), large escape velocities ($6{-}10\;\mathrm{km/s}$), and short free-fall times ($0.5{-}1\;\mathrm{Myr}$). Their multiwavelength properties motivate us to divide them into four categories, likely corresponding to four evolutionary stages from starless clumps to exposed HII region-cluster complexes. Leveraging age estimates for HST-identified clusters in the same region, we infer an evolutionary timeline going from $\sim$1-2 Myr before cluster formation as starless clumps, to $\sim$4-6 Myr after as exposed HII region-cluster complexes. Finally, we show that the YMCs make up a substantial fraction of recent star formation across the ring, exhibit an non-uniform azimuthal distribution without a very coherent evolutionary trend along the ring, and are capable of driving large-scale gas outflows., Comment: 27 pages, 12 figures; ApJ accepted

We compare the molecular cloud properties in sub-galactic regions of two galaxies, barred spiral NGC 1313, which is forming many massive clusters, and flocculent spiral NGC 7793, which is forming significantly fewer massive clusters despite having a similar star formation rate to NGC 1313. We find that there are larger variations in cloud properties between different regions within each galaxy than there are between the galaxies on a global scale, especially for NGC 1313. There are higher masses, linewidths, pressures, and virial parameters in the arms of NGC 1313 and center of NGC 7793 than in the interarm and outer regions of the galaxies. The massive cluster formation of NGC 1313 may be driven by its greater variation in environments, allowing more clouds with the necessary conditions to arise, although no one parameter seems primarily responsible for the difference in star formation. Meanwhile NGC 7793 has clouds that are as massive and have as much kinetic energy as clouds in the arms of NGC 1313, but have densities and pressures more similar to the interarm regions and so are less inclined to collapse and form stars. The cloud properties in NGC 1313 and NGC 7793 suggest that spiral arms, bars, interarm regions, and flocculent spirals each represent distinct environments with regard to molecular cloud populations. We see surprisingly little difference in surface densities between the regions, suggesting that the differences in surface densities frequently seen between arm and interarm regions of lower-resolution studies are indicative of the sparsity of molecular clouds, rather than differences in their true surface density., Comment: 24 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

We present a comparative study of the molecular gas in two galaxies from the LEGUS sample: barred spiral NGC 1313 and flocculent spiral NGC 7793. These two galaxies have similar masses, metallicities, and star formation rates, but NGC 1313 is forming significantly more massive star clusters than NGC 7793, especially young massive clusters (<10 Myr, >10^4 Msol). Using ALMA CO(2-1) observations of the two galaxies with the same sensitivities and resolutions of 13 pc, we directly compare the molecular gas in these two similar galaxies to determine the physical conditions responsible for their large disparity in cluster formation. By fitting size-linewidth relations for the clouds in each galaxy, we find that NGC 1313 has a higher intercept than NGC 7793, implying that its clouds have higher kinetic energies at a given size scale. NGC 1313 also has more clouds near virial equilibrium than NGC 7793, which may be connected to its higher rate of massive cluster formation. However, these virially bound clouds do not show a stronger correlation with young clusters than that of the general cloud population. We find surprisingly small differences between the distributions of molecular cloud populations in the two galaxies, though the largest of those differences are that NGC 1313 has higher surface densities and lower free-fall times., Comment: 25 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

Currently available star cluster catalogues from HST imaging of nearby galaxies heavily rely on visual inspection and classification of candidate clusters. The time-consuming nature of this process has limited the production of reliable catalogues and thus also post-observation analysis. To address this problem, deep transfer learning has recently been used to create neural network models which accurately classify star cluster morphologies at production scale for nearby spiral galaxies (D < 20 Mpc). Here, we use HST UV-optical imaging of over 20,000 sources in 23 galaxies from the Physics at High Angular Resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS) survey to train and evaluate two new sets of models: i) distance-dependent models, based on cluster candidates binned by galaxy distance (9-12 Mpc, 14-18 Mpc, 18-24 Mpc), and ii) distance-independent models, based on the combined sample of candidates from all galaxies. We find that the overall accuracy of both sets of models is comparable to previous automated star cluster classification studies (~60-80 per cent) and show improvement by a factor of two in classifying asymmetric and multi-peaked clusters from PHANGS-HST. Somewhat surprisingly, while we observe a weak negative correlation between model accuracy and galactic distance, we find that training separate models for the three distance bins does not significantly improve classification accuracy. We also evaluate model accuracy as a function of cluster properties such as brightness, colour, and SED-fit age. Based on the success of these experiments, our models will provide classifications for the full set of PHANGS-HST candidate clusters (N ~ 200,000) for public release., Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures

We investigate the ionised gas morphology, excitation properties, and kinematics in 19 nearby star-forming galaxies from the PHANGS-MUSE survey. We directly compare the kinetic energy of expanding superbubbles and the turbulent motions in the interstellar medium with the mechanical energy deposited by massive stars in the form of winds and supernovae, with the aim to answer whether the stellar feedback is responsible for the observed turbulent motions and to quantify the fraction of mechanical energy retained in the superbubbles. Based on the distribution of the flux and velocity dispersion in the H$\alpha$ line, we select 1484 regions of locally elevated velocity dispersion ($\sigma$(H$\alpha$)>45 km/s), including at least 171 expanding superbubbles. We analyse these regions and relate their properties to those of the young stellar associations and star clusters identified in PHANGS-HST data. We find a good correlation between the kinetic energy of the ionised gas and the total mechanical energy input from supernovae and stellar winds from the stellar associations, with a typical coupling efficiency of 10-20%. The contribution of mechanical energy by the supernovae alone is not sufficient to explain the measured kinetic energy of the ionised gas, which implies that pre-supernova feedback in the form of radiation/thermal pressure and winds is necessary. We find that the gas kinetic energy decreases with metallicity for our sample covering Z=0.5-1.0 Zsun, reflecting the lower impact of stellar feedback. For the sample of superbubbles, we find that about 40% of the young stellar associations are preferentially located in their rims. We also find a slightly higher (by ~15%) fraction of the youngest (<3 Myr) stellar associations in the rims of the superbubbles than in the centres, and the opposite for older associations, which implies possible propagation or triggering of star formation., Comment: Accepted by A&A. The abstract is abridged. 31 pages (including 8 pages in appendix), 20 figures, 2 tables

\noindent \textbf{Background:} Detailed spectroscopy of neutron-rich, heavy, deformed nuclei is of broad interest for nuclear astrophysics and nuclear structure. Nuclei in the r-process path and following freeze-out region impact the resulting r-process abundance distribution, and the structure of nuclei midshell in both proton and neutron number helps to understand the evolution of subshell gaps and large deformation in these nuclei. \noindent \textbf{Purpose:} To improve the understanding of the nuclear structure of $^{160}$Gd, specifically the $K^\pi$=$4^+$ bands, as well as study the $\beta$-decay of $^{160}$Eu into $^{160}$Gd. \noindent \textbf{Methods:} High-statistics decay spectroscopy of $^{160}$Gd resulting from the $\beta$-decay of $^{160}$Eu was collected using the GRIFFIN spectrometer at the TRIUMF-ISAC facility. \noindent \textbf{Results:} Two new excited states and ten new transitions were observed in $^{160}$Gd. The $\beta$-decaying half-lives of the low- and high-spin isomer in $^{160}$Eu were determined, and the low-spin state's half-life was measured to be $t_{1/2}=26.0(8)$~s, $\sim$16\% shorter than previous measurements. Lifetimes of the two $K^\pi$=$4^+$ band-heads in $^{160}$Gd were measured for the first time, as well as $\gamma$-$\gamma$ angular correlations and mixing ratios of intense transitions out of those band-heads. \noindent \textbf{Conclusions:} Lifetimes and mixing ratios suggest that the hexadecapole phonon model of the $K^\pi$=$4^+$ band-heads in $^{160}$Gd is preferred over a simple two-state strong mixing scenario, although further theoretical calculations are needed to fully understand these states. Additionally, the 1999.0 keV state in $^{160}$Gd heavily populated in $\beta$-decay is shown to have positive parity, which raises questions regarding the structure of the high-spin $\beta$-decaying state in $^{160}$Eu.

Nearly all current simulations predict that outcomes of the star formation process, such as the fraction of stars that form in bound clusters (Gamma), depend on the intensity of star formation activity (SigmaSFR) in the host galaxy. The exact shape and strength of the predicted correlations, however, vary from simulation to simulation. Observational results also remain unclear at this time, because most works have mixed estimates made from very young clusters for galaxies with higher SigmaSFR with those from older clusters for galaxies with lower SigmaSFR. The three blue compact dwarf (BCD) galaxies ESO185-IG13, ESO338-IG04, and Haro11 have played a central role on the observational side because they have some of the highest known SigmaSFR and published values of Gamma. We present new estimates of Gamma for these BCDs in three age intervals (1-10 Myr, 10-100 Myr, 100-400 Myr), based on age-dating which includes Halpha photometry to better discriminate between clusters younger and older than ~10 Myr. We find significantly lower values for Gamma (1-10 Myr) than published previously. The likely reason for the discrepancy is that previous estimates appear to be based on age-reddening results that underestimated ages and overestimated reddening for many clusters, artificially boosting Gamma (1-10 Myr). We also find that fewer stars remain in clusters over time, with ~15-39% in 1-10 Myr, ~5-7% in 10-100 Myr, and ~1-2% in 100-400 Myr clusters. We find no evidence that Gamma increases with SigmaSFR. These results imply that cluster formation efficiency does not vary with star formation intensity in the host galaxy. If confirmed, our results will help guide future assumptions in galaxy-scale simulations of cluster formation and evolution., Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ

Connecting the gas in HII regions to the underlying source of the ionizing radiation can help us constrain the physical processes of stellar feedback and how HII regions evolve over time. With PHANGS$\unicode{x2013}$MUSE we detect nearly 24,000 HII regions across 19 galaxies and measure the physical properties of the ionized gas (e.g. metallicity, ionization parameter, density). We use catalogues of multi-scale stellar associations from PHANGS$\unicode{x2013}$HST to obtain constraints on the age of the ionizing sources. We construct a matched catalogue of 4,177 HII regions that are clearly linked to a single ionizing association. A weak anti-correlation is observed between the association ages and the H$\alpha$ equivalent width EW(H$\alpha$), the H$\alpha$/FUV flux ratio and the ionization parameter, log q. As all three are expected to decrease as the stellar population ages, this could indicate that we observe an evolutionary sequence. This interpretation is further supported by correlations between all three properties. Interpreting these as evolutionary tracers, we find younger nebulae to be more attenuated by dust and closer to giant molecular clouds, in line with recent models of feedback-regulated star formation. We also observe strong correlations with the local metallicity variations and all three proposed age tracers, suggestive of star formation preferentially occurring in locations of locally enhanced metallicity. Overall, EW(H$\alpha$) and log q show the most consistent trends and appear to be most reliable tracers for the age of an HII region., Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS

Card and Krueger (1992a,b) used labor market outcomes to study the productivity of school spending. Following their lead, we examine effects of post-1990 school finance reforms on students' educational attainment and labor market outcomes. Using a state-by-cohort panel design, we find that reforms increased high school completion and college-going, concentrated among Black students and women, and raised annual earnings. They also increased the return to education, particularly for Black students and men and driven by the return to high school. [This paper was published in "Journal of Labor Economics" v40 suppl 1 Apr 2022.]

Star formation and stellar feedback are interlinked processes that redistribute energy and matter throughout galaxies. When young, massive stars form in spatially clustered environments, they create pockets of expanding gas termed superbubbles. As these processes play a critical role in shaping galaxy discs and regulating the baryon cycle, measuring the properties of superbubbles provides important input for galaxy evolution models. With wide coverage and high angular resolution (50-150 pc) of the PHANGS-ALMA $^{12}$CO (2-1) survey, we can now resolve and identify a statistically representative number of superbubbles with molecular gas in nearby galaxies. We identify superbubbles by requiring spatial correspondence between shells in CO with stellar populations identified in PHANGS-HST, and combine the properties of the stellar populations with CO to constrain feedback models and quantify their energetics. We visually identify 325 cavities across 18 PHANGS-ALMA galaxies, 88 of which have clear superbubble signatures (unbroken shells, central clusters, kinematic signatures of expansion). We measure their radii and expansion velocities using CO to dynamically derive their ages and the mechanical power driving the bubbles, which we use to compute the expected properties of the parent stellar populations driving the bubbles. We find consistency between the predicted and derived stellar ages and masses of the stellar populations if we use a supernova blast wave model that injects energy with a coupling efficiency of 10%, whereas continuous models fail to explain stellar ages we measure. Not only does this confirm molecular gas accurately traces superbubble properties, but it also provides key observational constraints for superbubble models. We also find evidence that the bubbles sweep up gas as they expand and speculate that these sites have the potential to host new generations of stars., Comment: 21 pages, 15 figures, 3 tables. Accepted to A&A. Abstract abridged for arXiv

The ultra-luminous infrared galaxy Arp2 20 is a late-stage merger with several tidal structures in the outskirts and two very compact, dusty nuclei that show evidence for extreme star formation and host at least one AGN. New and archival high-resolution images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope provide a state-of-the-art view of the structures, dust, and stellar clusters in Arp 220. We find that ~90% of the Halpha emission arises from a shock-ionized bubble emanating from the AGN in the western nucleus, while the nuclear disks dominate the Pbeta emission. Four very young (~3-6 Myr) but lower mass (< 10^4 Msun) clusters are detected in Halpha within a few arcsec of the nuclei, but produce less than 1% of the line emission. We see little evidence for a population of massive clusters younger than 100Myr anywhere in Arp 220. From the masses and ages of the detected clusters, we find that star formation took place more-or-less continuously starting ~few Gyr ago with a rate between ~3-12 Msun/yr. Approximately 100Myr ago, star formation shut off suddenly everywhere, except in the nuclear disks. A very recent flicker of weak star formation produced the four young, low-mass clusters, while the rest of the galaxy appears to have remained in a post-starburst state. Cluster ages indicate that the tidal structures on the west side of the galaxy are older than those on the east side, but all appear to pre-date the shutoff of star formation. Arp 220 has many of the characteristics expected of a 'Shocked Post-Starburst Galaxy' or SPOG, since most of the system has been in a post-starburst state for the past ~100Myr and the detected Halpha emission arises from shocked rather than photo-ionized gas., Comment: accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal

A long-standing problem when deriving the physical properties of stellar populations is the degeneracy between age, reddening, and metallicity. When a single metallicity is used for all star clusters in a galaxy, this degeneracy can result in $`$catastrophic$'$ errors for old globular clusters. Typically, approximately 10 - 20 % of all clusters detected in spiral galaxies can have ages that are incorrect by a factor of ten or more. In this paper we present a pilot study for four galaxies (NGC 628, NGC 1433, NGC 1365, and NGC 3351) from the PHANGS-HST survey. We describe methods to correct the age-dating for old globular clusters, by first identifying candidates using their colors, and then reassigning ages and reddening based on a lower metallicity solution. We find that young $`$interlopers$'$ can be identified from their Halpha flux. CO (2-1) intensity or the presence of dust can also be used, but our tests show that they do not work as well. Improvements in the success fraction are possible at the $\sim$ 15 % level (reducing the fraction of catastrophic age-estimates from between 13 - 21 % to 3 - 8 %). A large fraction of the incorrectly age-dated globular clusters are systematically given ages around 100 Myr, polluting the younger populations as well. Incorrectly age-dated globular clusters significantly impact the observed cluster age distribution in NGC 628, which affects the physical interpretation of cluster disruption in this galaxy. For NGC 1365, we also demonstrate how to fix a second major age-dating problem, where very dusty young clusters with E(B-V) $>$ 1.5 mag are assigned old, globular-cluster like ages. Finally, we note the discovery of a dense population of $\sim$ 300 Myr clusters around the central region of NGC 1365. and discuss how this results naturally from the dynamics in a barred galaxy., Comment: 27 pages, 17 figures (NOTE: 1, 5, 9, 12, 14 are lower resolution than in the journal)

PHANGS-JWST mid-infrared (MIR) imaging of nearby spiral galaxies has revealed ubiquitous filaments of dust emission in intricate detail. We present a pilot study to systematically map the dust filament network (DFN) at multiple scales between 25-400 pc in NGC 628. MIRI images at 7.7, 10, 11.3 and 21$\mu$m of NGC 628 are used to generate maps of the filaments in emission, while PHANGS-HST B-band imaging yields maps of dust attenuation features. We quantify the correspondence between filaments traced by MIR thermal continuum / polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) emission and filaments detected via extinction / scattering of visible light; the fraction of MIR flux contained in the DFN; and the fraction of HII regions, young star clusters and associations within the DFN. We examine the dependence of these quantities with the physical scale at which the DFN is extracted. With our highest resolution DFN maps (25 pc filament width), we find that filaments in emission and attenuation are co-spatial in 40% of sight lines, often exhibiting detailed morphological agreement; that ~30% of the MIR flux is associated with the DFN; and that 75-80% of HII regions and 60% of star clusters younger than 5 Myr are contained within the DFN. However, the DFN at this scale is anti-correlated with looser associations of stars younger than 5 Myr identified using PHANGS-HST near-UV imaging. We discuss the impact of these findings for studies of star formation and the ISM, and the broad range of new investigations enabled with multi-scale maps of the DFN., Comment: 21 pages, 14 figures, accepted for publication as part of PHANGS-JWST ApJL Focus Issue

A primary new capability of JWST is the ability to penetrate the dust in star forming galaxies to identify and study the properties of young star clusters that remain embedded in dust and gas. In this paper we combine new infrared images taken with JWST with our optical HST images of the star-bursting barred (Seyfert2) spiral galaxy NGC 1365. We find that this galaxy has the richest population of massive young clusters of any known galaxy within 30 Mpc, with $\sim$ 30 star clusters that are more massive than 10$^6$ Msolar and younger than 10 Myr. Sixteen of these clusters are newly discovered from our JWST observations. An examination of the optical images reveals that 4 of 30 ($\sim$13$\%$) are so deeply embedded that they cannot be seen in the I band (AV $\gt$ 10 mag), and that 11 of 30 ($\sim$37$\%$) are missing in the HST B band, so age and mass estimates from optical measurements alone are challenging. These numbers suggest that massive clusters in NGC 1365 remain obscured in the visible for $\sim$ 1.3 $\pm$ 0.7 Myr, and are either completely or partially obscured for $\sim$ 3.7 $\pm$ 1.1 Myr. We also use the JWST observations to gain new insights into the triggering of star cluster formation by the collision of gas and dust streamers with gas and dust in the bar. The JWST images reveal previously unknown structures (e.g., bridges and overshoot regions from stars that form in the bar) that help us better understand the orbital dynamics of barred galaxies and associated star-forming rings. Finally, we note that the excellent spatial resolution of the NIRCAM F200W filter provides a better way to separate barely resolved compact clusters from individual stars based on their sizes., Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publications as part of PHANGS-JWST ApJL Focus Issue

We develop a method to identify and determine the physical properties of stellar associations using Hubble Space Telescope (HST) NUV-U-B-V-I imaging of nearby galaxies from the PHANGS-HST survey. We apply a watershed algorithm to density maps constructed from point source catalogues Gaussian smoothed to multiple physical scales from 8 to 64 pc. We develop our method on two galaxies that span the distance range in the PHANGS-HST sample: NGC 3351 (10 Mpc), NGC 1566 (18 Mpc). We test our algorithm with different parameters such as the choice of detection band for the point source catalogue (NUV or V), source density image filtering methods, and absolute magnitude limits. We characterise the properties of the resulting multi-scale associations, including sizes, number of tracer stars, number of associations, photometry, as well as ages, masses, and reddening from Spectral Energy Distribution fitting. Our method successfully identifies structures that occupy loci in the UBVI colour-colour diagram consistent with previously published catalogues of clusters and associations. The median ages of the associations increases from log(age/yr) = 6.6 to log(age/yr) = 6.9 as the spatial scale increases from 8 pc to 64 pc for both galaxies. We find that the youngest stellar associations, with ages < 3 Myr, indeed closely trace H ii regions in H$\alpha$ imaging, and that older associations are increasingly anti-correlated with the H$\alpha$ emission. Owing to our new method, the PHANGS-HST multi-scale associations provide a far more complete census of recent star formation activity than found with previous cluster and compact association catalogues. The method presented here will be applied to the full sample of 38 PHANGS-HST galaxies., Comment: Submitted to MNRAS. Referee report received with minor comments, and "request to clarify if the smaller associations are always included in the larger ones and how this may affect the photometric fitting of the larger association if the groups have different ages." Revision in progress

We compare embedded young massive star clusters (YMCs) to (sub-)millimeter line observations tracing the excitation and dissociation of molecular gas in the starburst ring of NGC 1365. This galaxy hosts one of the strongest nuclear starbursts and richest populations of YMCs within 20 Mpc. Here we combine near-/mid-IR PHANGS-JWST imaging with new ALMA multi-J CO (1-0, 2-1 and 4-3) and [CI](1-0) mapping, which we use to trace CO excitation via R42 = I_CO(4-3)/I_CO(2-1) and R21 = I_CO(2-1)/I_CO(1-0) and dissociation via RCICO = I_[CI](1-0)/I_CO(2-1) at 330 pc resolution. We find that the gas flowing into the starburst ring from northeast to southwest appears strongly affected by stellar feedback, showing decreased excitation (lower R42) and increased signatures of dissociation (higher RCICO) in the downstream regions. There, radiative transfer modeling suggests that the molecular gas density decreases and temperature and [CI/CO] abundance ratio increase. We compare R42 and RCICO with local conditions across the regions and find that both correlate with near-IR 2 um emission tracing the YMCs and with both PAH (11.3 um) and dust continuum (21 um) emission. In general, RCICO exhibits ~ 0.1 dex tighter correlations than R42, suggesting CI to be a more sensitive tracer of changing physical conditions in the NGC 1365 starburst than CO (4-3). Our results are consistent with a scenario where gas flows into the two arm regions along the bar, becomes condensed/shocked, forms YMCs, and then these YMCs heat and dissociate the gas., Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures and 2 tables in total (12 pages and 6 figures in main text). Accepted as part of a PHANGS-JWST Focus Issue to appear in ApJL