Calibrating the TP-AGB phase through resolved stellar populations in the Small Magellanic Cloud

The Thermally-Pulsing Asymptotic Giant Branch (TP-AGB) phase is one of the most uncertain evolutionary phase of low- and intermediate-mass stars. The classical calibration based on Magellanic Clouds (MCs) clusters has proved to be unsuitable for other galaxies and the overall contribution of TP-AGB stars to the integrated light of galaxies is still a matter of debate. The high-quality observations of resolved populations in the MCs offer a unique opportunity to extend and enhance the calibration of this phase. We constrain the key uncertain parameters by comparing observed star counts, luminosity functions and color distributions of the TP-AGB population in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) with those computed through the stellar population synthesis code TRILEGAL, which includes the latest TP-AGB evolutionary tracks from the COLIBRI code. The strength of our approach is represented by the detailed space-resolved star formation history of the SMC, derived from the deep near-infrared photometry of the VISTA survey of the MCs...