Light-curve Modulation of Low-mass Stars in K2. I. Identification of 481 Fast Rotators in the Solar Neighborhood

The K2 mission is targeting large numbers of nearby (d 40 mas yr^(−1), V < 20). Additionally, the mission is targeting low-mass, high proper motion stars associated with the local (d < 500 pc) Galactic halo population also selected from SUPERBLINK. K2 campaigns 0 through 8 monitored a total of 26,518 of these cool main-sequence stars. We used the auto-correlation function to search for fast rotators by identifying short-period photometric modulations in the K2 light curves. We identified 481 candidate fast rotators with rotation periods