Deep CCD surface photometry of galaxy clusters. II. Searching for intracluster starlight in non-CD clusters

We report the search for intracluster light in four Abell type II-III (non-cD) galaxy clusters: A801, A1234, A1553, and A1914. We find that on average these clusters contain similar to10% of their detected stellar luminosity in a diffuse component. We show that for two of the clusters the intracluster light closely follows the galaxy distribution, but in the other two cases, there are noticeable differences between the spatial distribution of the galaxies and the intracluster light. We report the results of a search for intracluster tidal debris in each cluster and note that A1914 in particular has a number of strong tidal features likely due to its status as a recent cluster merger. One of the A1914 features appears to be spatially coincident with an extension seen in weak lensing maps, implying that the feature traces a large amount of mass. We compare these results with numerical simulations of hierarchically formed galaxy clusters and find good general agreement between the observed and simulated images, although we also find that our observations sample only the brightest features of the intracluster light. Together, these results suggest that intracluster light can be a valuable tool in determining the evolutionary state of galaxy clusters.