  Core helium burning primary red clump (RC) stars are evolved red giant stars
which are excellent standard candles. As such, these stars are routinely used
to map the Milky Way or determine the distance to other galaxies among other
things. However distinguishing RC stars from their less evolved precursors,
namely red giant branch (RGB) stars, is still a difficult challenge and has
been deemed the domain of asteroseismology. In this work, we use a sample of
1,676 RGB and RC stars which have both single epoch infrared spectra from the
APOGEE survey and asteroseismic parameters and classification to show that the
spectra alone can be used to (1) predict asteroseismic parameters with
precision high enough to (2) distinguish core helium burning RC from other
giant stars with less than 2% contamination. This will not only allow for a
clean selection of a large number of standard candles across our own and other
galaxies from spectroscopic surveys, but also will remove one of the primary
roadblocks for stellar evolution studies of mixing and mass loss in red giant
stars.
