The True Surface Mass density of Cold Dark Matter Halos

The cold dark matter (CDM) scenario generically predicts the existence of triaxial dark matter halos which contain notable amounts of substructure. However, analytical halo models with smooth, spherically symmetric density profiles are routinely adopted in the modelling of light propagation effects through such objects. In this paper, we report the biases introduced by this procedure by comparing the surface mass densities of actual N-body halos against the widely used analytical model suggested by Navarro, Frenk and White (1996) (NFW). We conduct our analysis in the redshift range of 0.0 − 1.5.