Observational constraints of an anisotropic boost due to the projection effects using redMaPPer clusters

Abstract

Optical clusters identified from red-sequence galaxies suffer from projection effects, where interloper galaxies along the line-of-sight to a cluster are mistaken as genuine members of the cluster. In the previous study (Sunayama et al. 2020), we found that the projection effects cause the boost on the amplitudes of clustering and lensing on large scale compared to the expected amplitudes in the absence of any projection effects. These boosts are caused by preferential selections of filamentary structure aligned to the line-of-sight due to distance uncertainties in photometric surveys. We model the projection effects with two simple assumptions and develop a novel method to quantify the size of the boost using cluster-galaxy cross-correlation functions. We validate our method using mock cluster catalogs built from cosmological N-body simulations and find that we can obtain unbiased constraints on the boost parameter with our model. We then apply our analysis on the SDSS redMaPPer clusters and find that the size of the boost is roughly 20% for all the richness bins except the cluster sample with the richness bin $λ\in [30,40]$. This is the first study to constrain the boost parameter independent from cluster cosmology studies and provides a self-consistency test for the projection effects.