Context : The low obscuration and proximity of the Carina nebula make it an ideal place to study the ongoing star formation process and impact of massive stars on low-mass stars in their surroundings .

Aims : To investigate this process , we generated a new catalog of the pre-main-sequence ( PMS ) stars in the Carina west ( CrW ) region and studied their nature and spatial distribution .
We also determined various parameters ( reddening , reddening law , age , mass ) , which are used further to estimate the initial mass function ( IMF ) and K -band luminosity function ( KLF ) for the region under study .

Methods : We obtained deep UBVRI H \alpha photometric data of the field situated to the west of the main Carina nebula and centered on WR 22 .
Medium-resolution optical spectroscopy of a subsample of X-ray selected objects along with archival data sets from Chandra , XMM - Newton and 2MASS surveys were used for the present study .
Different sets of color-color and color-magnitude diagrams are used to determine reddening for the region and to identify young stellar objects ( YSOs ) and estimate their age and mass .

Results : Our spectroscopic results indicate that the majority of the X-ray sources are late spectral type stars .
The region shows a large amount of differential reddening with minimum and maximum values of E ( B - V ) as 0.25 and 1.1 mag , respectively .
Our analysis reveals that the total-to-selective absorption ratio R _ { V } is \sim 3.7 \pm 0.1 , suggesting an abnormal grain size in the observed region .
We identified 467 YSOs and studied their characteristics .
The ages and masses of the 241 optically identified YSOs range from \sim 0.1 to 10 Myr and \sim 0.3 to 4.8 M _ { \odot } , respectively .
However , the majority of them are younger than 1 Myr and have masses below 2 M _ { \odot } .
The high mass star WR 22 does not seem to have contributed to the formation of YSOs in the CrW region .
The initial mass function slope , \Gamma , in this region is found to be - 1.13 \pm 0.20 in the mass range of 0.5 < M/M _ { \odot } < 4.8 .
The K -band luminosity function slope ( \alpha ) is also estimated as 0.31 \pm 0.01 .
We also performed minimum spanning tree analysis of the YSOs in this region , which reveals that there are at least ten YSO cores associated with the molecular cloud , and that leads to an average core radius of 0.43 pc and a median branch length of 0.28 pc .

Conclusions :