Optical spectroscopy of very low mass stars in the Pleiades

We have obtained optical spectrophotometry for several cool stars recently found by us in a deep multicolor optical survey of the Pleiades. This survey has the distinct advantage of analyzing stars, which if proven to be cluster members, are of a known age and metallicity, which cannot be said of local cool stars. In addition, we have also observed several stars studied by Berriman and Reid in order to place the Pleiades candidates relative to these nearby stars. Based upon analysis of the spectra of the nearby stars, we define several molecular band indices (four TiO and one VO) and one index which measures the slope of the virtual continuum in order to segregate and classify stars in terms of effective temperature. Some of these indices are well correlated, in a linear fashion, with log (T eff )