Weak lensing by triaxial galaxy clusters

Weak gravitational lensing studies of galaxy clusters often assume a spherical cluster model to simplify the analysis, but some recent studies have suggested this simplifying assumption may result in large biases in estimated cluster masses and concentration values, since clusters are expected to exhibit triaxiality. Several such analyses have, however, quoted expressions for the spatial derivatives of the lensing potential in triaxial models, which are open to misinterpretation. In this paper, we give a clear description of weak lensing by triaxial Navarro-Frenk-White (NFW) galaxy clusters and also present an efficient and robust method to model these clusters and obtain parameter estimates. By considering four highly triaxial NFW galaxy clusters, we re-examine the impact of the simplifying assumption of sphericity and find that while the concentration estimates are largely unbiased, except in one of our triaxial NFW simulated clusters, the masses are significantly biased, by up to 40 per cent, for all the clusters we analysed. Moreover, we find that erroneously assuming spherical symmetry can lead to the mistaken conclusion that some substructure is present in the galaxy clusters or, even worse, that multiple galaxy clusters are present in the field. Our cluster fitting method also allows one to answer the question of whether a given cluster exhibits triaxiality or a simple spherical model is good enough.