Shape Profiles and Orientation Bias for Weak and Strong Lensing Cluster Halos

We study the intrinsic shape and alignment of isodensities of galaxy cluster halos extracted from the MultiDark MDR1 cosmological simulation. We find that the simulated halos are extremely prolate on small scales and increasingly spherical on larger ones. Due to this trend, analytical projection along the line of sight produces an overestimation of the concentration index as a decreasing function of radius, which we quantify by using both the intrinsic distribution of three-dimensional concentrations (c ₂₀₀) and isodensity shape on weak and strong lensing scales. We find this difference to be ~18% (~9%) for low- (medium-)mass cluster halos with intrinsically low concentrations (c ₂₀₀ = 1-3), while we find virtually no difference for halos with intrinsically high concentrations. Isodensities are found to be fairly well aligned throughout the entirety of the radial scale of each halo population. However, major axes of individual halos have been found to deviate by as much as ~30°. We also present a value-added catalog of our analysis results, which we have made publicly available to download.