TolTEC/LMT Galactic Star Formation Legacy Surveys: A Large-Area Search for Cores and a Survey of B-Fields in Filamentary Clouds

High angular resolution millimeter-wave observations of protostars with ALMA are revolutionizing our understanding of the birth of stars and planets. Star formation is governed by physical processes that operate over a huge range of physical scales, including for example stellar feedback and magnetic effects, and this highlights the need to leverage the ALMA discoveries by adding a holistic view. Such a view will be provided by TolTEC, a revolutionary 7,000-pixel imager for the 50-meter Large Millimeter Telescope. TolTEC captures total and polarized intensities at 1.1, 1.4 and 2.1 mm, all simultaneously. During 2019-2021, TolTEC/LMT will conduct two public Galactic star formation legacy surveys. The Clouds-to-Cores (C2C) Legacy survey will map over a dozen nearby (<1.5 kpc) giant molecular clouds in their entirety, characterizing the core spatial distribution, properties and core mass function (CMF) down to 0.1 Msun, well beyond what has been possible in the past for such a large sky area. C2C will thereby test theories that postulate a causal connection between CMF and stellar initial mass function (IMF). The Fields-in-Filaments (FIF) Legacy Survey will obtain deep observations of polarized dust emission from five filaments located in five different nearby (< 450 pc) clouds plus two more distant filamentary infrared dark clouds (IRDCs). The resulting 5 arcsec resolution B-field maps will be compared with ALMA observations as well as with MHD simulations to estimate B-field strengths and to study the effects of B-fields on the formation of planet-forming disks. The C2C and FIF surveys will provide important public legacy datasets, informing a wide range of future investigations into the origins of stars and planets. More details on TolTEC can be found on our website: http://toltec.astro.umass.edu