We provide a new view on the Cygnus-X north complex by accessing for the first time the low mass content of young stellar populations in the region .
CFHT/WIRCam camera was used to perform a deep near-IR survey of this complex , sampling stellar masses down to \sim 0.1 M _ { \odot } .
Several analysis tools , including a extinction treatment developed in this work , were employed to identify and uniformly characterise a dozen unstudied young star clusters in the area .
Investigation of their mass distributions in low-mass domain revealed a relatively uniform log-normal IMF with a characteristic mass of 0.32 \pm 0.08 M _ { \odot } and mass dispersion of 0.40 \pm 0.06 .
In the high mass regime , their derived slopes showed that while the youngest clusters ( age < 4 Myr ) presented slightly shallower values with respect to the Salpeter ’ s , our older clusters ( 4 Myr < age < 18 Myr ) showed IMF compliant values and a slightly denser stellar population .
Although possibly evidencing a deviation from an ’ universal ’ IMF , these results also supports a scenario where these gas dominated young clusters gradually ’ build up ’ their IMF by accreting low-mass stars formed in their vicinity during their first \sim 3 Myr , before the gas expulsion phase , emerging at the age of \sim 4 Myr with a fully fledged IMF .
Finally , the derived distances to these clusters confirmed the existence of at least 3 different star forming regions throughout Cygnus-X north complex , at distances of 500-900 pc , 1.4-1.7 kpc and 3.0 kpc , and revealed evidence of a possible interaction between some of these stellar populations and the Cygnus-OB2 association .