This study investigated the initial mass function (IMF) and star formation history of high-mass stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) using a population synthesis technique. We used the photometric survey catalog of Lee (2013) as the observable quantities and compare them with those of synthetic populations based on Bayesian inference. For the IMF slope (γ) range of -1.1 to -3.5 with steps of 0.1, five types of star formation models were tested: 1) continuous; 2) single burst at 10 Myr; 3) single burst at 60 Myr; 4) double bursts at those epochs; and 5) a complex hybrid model. In this study, a total of 125 models were tested. Based on the model calculations, it was found that the continuous model could simulate the high-mass stars of the SMC and that its IMF slope was -1.6 which is slightly steeper than Salpeter's IMF, i.e., γ=-1.35.

We performed a BVR photometric survey for the entire Small Magellanic Cloud (~26 deg 2 ) with a mosaic system, Wide Field Imager (WFI), covering three seasons: September and October 2001 and November 2002. Through the usual data reduction procedures, we present ~0.73 million catalogue stars brighter than 19 magnitude in B amongst a total of ~1.3 million and compare them with published astrometry and photometry results. We found that the average differences between our and the published data are ~0.7 arcsec in astrometry and 0.065, 0.054, and 0.163 in B, V, and R, respectively, in photometry. In addition, using the 2dF spectroscopic data from Evans et al. (2004), we determined the color excesses in (B-V) and (V-R) to be 0.086±0.156, and 0.065±0.112, respectively, while for the distance modulus, we obtained 18.55±1.05.