GOALS-JWST: Revealing the Buried Star Clusters in the Luminous Infrared Galaxy VV 114

We present the results of a {\it James Webb Space Telescope} NIRCaminvestigation into the young massive star cluster (YMC) population in theluminous infrared galaxy VV 114. We identify 374 compact YMC candidates with a$S/N \geq 3$, 5, and 5 at F150W, F200W, and F356W respectively. A directcomparison with our {\it HST} cluster catalog reveals that $\sim 20\%$ of thesesources are undetected at optical wavelengths. Based on {\it yggdrasil} stellarpopulation models, we identify 17 YMC candidates in our {\it JWST} imagingalone with F150W-F200W and F200W-F356W colors suggesting they are all veryyoung, dusty ($A_{V} = 5 - 15$), and massive ($10^{5.8} < M_{\odot} <10^{6.1}$). The discovery of these `hidden' sources, many of which are found inthe `overlap' region between the two nuclei, quadruples the number of $t < 3$Myr clusters, and nearly doubles the number of $t < 6$ Myr clusters detected inVV 114. Now extending the cluster age distribution ($dN/d\tau \propto\tau^{\gamma}$) to the youngest ages, we find a slope of $\gamma = -1.30 \pm0.39$ for $10^{6} < \tau (\mathrm{yr}) < 10^{7}$, which is consistent with thepreviously determined value from $10^{7} < \tau (\mathrm{yr}) < 10^{8.5}$, andconfirms that VV 114 has a steep age distribution slope for all massive starclusters across the entire range of cluster ages observed. Finally, theconsistency between our {\it JWST}- and {\it HST}-derived age distributionslopes indicates that the balance between cluster formation and destruction hasnot been significantly altered in VV 114 over the last 0.5 Gyr.