The Density Profile of Massive Galaxy Clusters from Weak Lensing

Abstract

We use measurements of weak gravitational shear around a sample of massive galaxy clusters at z = 0.3 to constrain their average radial density profile. Our results are consistent with the density profiles of CDM halos in numerical simulations and inconsistent with simple models of self-interacting dark matter. Unlike some other recent studies, we are not probing the scales where the baryonic mass component becomes dynamically important, and so our results should be directly comparable to CDM N-body simulations.