Quantifying the Projected Suppression of Cluster Escape Velocity Profiles

Abstract

The 3D radial escape-velocity profile of galaxy clusters has been suggested to be a promising and competitive tool for constraining mass profiles and cosmological parameters in an accelerating universe. However, the observed line-of-sight escape profile is known to be suppressed compared to the underlying 3D radial (or tangential) escape profile. Past work has suggested that velocity anisotropy in the phase-space data is the root cause. Instead, we find that the observed suppression is from the statistical undersampling of the phase spaces and that the 3D radial escape edge can be accurately inferred from projected data. We build an analytical model for this suppression that only requires the number of observed galaxies $N$ in the phase-space data within the sky-projected range $0.3 \le r_\perp/R_{200, \text{critical}} \le 1$. The radially averaged suppression function is an inverse power law $\langle Z_\text{v} \rangle = 1 + (N_0/N)^\lambda$ with $N_0 = 17.818$ and $\lambda= 0.362$. We test our model with $N$-body simulations, using dark matter particles, subhalos, and semianalytic galaxies as the phase-space tracers, and find excellent agreement. We also assess the model for systematic biases from cosmology ($\Omega_{\Lambda}$, $H_0$), cluster mass ($M_{200, \text{critical}}$), and velocity anisotropy ($\beta$). We find that varying these parameters over large ranges can impart a maximal additional fractional change in $\langle Z_\text{v} \rangle$ of $2.7\%$. These systematics are highly subdominant (by at least a factor of 13.7) to the suppression from $N$.