A standard method to study the mass distribution in galaxy clusters is through strong lensing of background galaxies in which the positions of multiple images of the same source constrain the surface mass distribution of the cluster. However, current
parametrized mass models can often only reproduce the observed positions to within one or a few arcsec which is worse than the positional measurement uncertainty. One suggested explanation for this discrepancy is the additional perturbations of the path of the light ray caused by matter density fluctuations along the line of sight. We investigate this by calculating the statistical expectation value for the angular deflections caused by density fluctuations, which can be done given the matter power spectrum. We find that density fluctuations can, indeed, produce deflections of a few arcsec. We also find that the deflection angle of a particular image is expected to increase with source redshift and with the angular distance on the sky to the lens. Since the light rays of neighbouring images pass through much the same density fluctuations, it turns out that the images expected deflection angles can be highly correlated. This implies that line-of-sight density fluctuations are a significant and possibly dominant systematic for strong lensing mass modeling and set a lower limit to how well a cluster mass model can be expected to replicate the observed image positions. We discuss how the deflections and correlations should explicitly be taken into account in the mass model fitting procedure.
The distribution of mass in the halos of galaxies and galaxy clusters has been probed observationally, theoretically, and in numerical simulations. Yet there is still confusion about which of several suggested parameterized models is the better repre
sentation, and whether these models are universal. We use the temperature and density profiles of the intracluster medium as measured by X-ray observations of 11 relaxed galaxy clusters to investigate mass models for the halo using a thorough Bayesian statistical analysis. We make careful comparisons between two- and three-parameter models, including the issue of a universal third parameter. We find that, of the two-parameter models, the NFW is the best representation, but we also find moderate statistical evidence that a generalized three-parameter NFW model with a freely varying inner slope is preferred, despite penalizing against the extra degree of freedom. There is a strong indication that this inner slope needs to be determined for each cluster individually, i.e. some clusters have central cores and others have steep cusps. The mass-concentration relation of our sample is in reasonable agreement with predictions based on numerical simulations.
Dark matter particles form halos that contribute the major part of the mass of galaxy clusters. The formation of these cosmological structures have been investigated both observationally and in numerical simulations, which have confirmed the existenc
e of a universal mass profile. However, the dynamic behaviour of dark matter in halos is not as well understood. We have used observations of 16 equilibrated galaxy clusters to show that the random velocities of dark matter particles are larger on average along the radial direction than along the tangential, and that the magnitude of this velocity anisotropy is radially varying. Our measurement implies that the collective behaviour of dark matter particles is fundamentally different from that of normal particles and the radial variation of the anisotropy velocity agrees with the predictions of numerical simulation.
We consider direct dark matter detection rates and investigate the difference between a standard Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution and a realistic distribution like the ones extracted from numerical N-body simulations. Sizable differences are o
bserved when such results are compared to the standard Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. For a light target both the total rate and the annual modulation are reduced by ~25%. For a heavy target the total rate is virtually unchanged, whereas the annual modulation is modified by up to 50%, depending on the WIMP mass and detector energy threshold. We also consider the effect of a possible velocity anisotropy, and the effect is found to be largest for a light target For the realistic velocity distribution the anisotropy may reduce the annual modulation, in contrast to the Maxwell-Boltzmann case.
