Knowing the metallicity distribution of stars in the Galactic Centre has important implications for the formation history of the Milky Way nuclear star cluster. However, this distribution is not well known, and is currently based on a small sample of fewer than 100 stars. We obtained near-infrared K-band spectra of more than 700 late-type stars in the central 4pc^2^ of the Milky Way nuclear star cluster with the integral-field spectrograph KMOS (VLT). We analyse the medium-resolution spectra using a full-spectral fitting method employing the Gottingen spectral library of synthetic PHOENIX spectra. The derived stellar metallicities range from metal-rich [M/H]>+0.3dex to metal-poor [M/H]<-1.0dex, with a fraction of 5.2^+6.0^-3.1 per cent metal-poor ([M/H]0dex), a globular cluster origin can be ruled out. As there is only a very low fraction of metal-poor stars in the central 4pc^2^ of the Galactic Centre, we believe that our data can discard a scenario in which the Milky Way nuclear star cluster is purely formed from infalling globular clusters.

Cone search capability for table J/MNRAS/464/194/tableb1 (Table of stellar parameters)