Shape Profiles and Orientation Bias for Weak and Strong Lensing Cluster Halos [CEA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.2035


We study the intrinsic shape and alignment of isodensities of galaxy cluster halos extracted from the MultiDark MDR1 cosmological simulation. We find that the simulated halos are extremely prolate on small scales, and increasingly spherical on larger ones. Due to this trend, projection along the line of sight produces an overestimate of the concentration index as a decreasing function of radius. Based on this result, we predict that the selection of clusters based upon their strong lensing features will tend to produce a larger over-concentration bias when compared with weak lensing of this same population, a difference of $\sim 17\%$. Isodensities are found to be fairly well-aligned throughout the entirety of the radial scale of each halo population. However, major axes of individual halos have been found to deviate by as much as $\sim 30^{\circ}$. We also present a value-added catalog of our analysis results, which we have made publicly available to download.

Read this paper on arXiv…

A. Groener and D. Goldberg
Fri, 9 May 14
24/54

Comments: 13 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables