The reviews presented in this volume cover a huge range of cluster of galaxies topics. Readers will find the book essential reading on subjects such as the physics of the ICM gas, the internal cluster dynamics, and the detection of clusters using different observational techniques. The expert chapter authors also cover the huge advances being made in analytical or numerical modeling of clusters, weak and strong lensing effects, and the large scale structure as traced by clusters.

Abundance measurements of galaxy clusters provide powerful constraints of cosmology. The observed distribution of clusters can potentially be used to disentangle whether the accelerated cosmic expansion can be explained by a modification to Einstein's theory of gravity or whether the explanation involves a new form of 'dark' energy. Such growth of structure measurements are both complementary to and provide an important cross-check of measurements of the geometry of the universe. There are two key requirements for cosmology with galaxy clusters: a census of these systems through cosmic time and the ability to connect the measured signal with the underlying mass of the galaxy cluster. In this era of large-area millimeter and optical wavelength surveys (including the South Pole Telescope (SPT) 2500-square-degree SZ-Survey and the Dark Energy Survey (DES)) where hundreds (mm-wave) to hundreds of thousands (optical) of clusters will be detected, the most serious limitation to cluster cosmology remains understanding and calibrating observable-mass relations. Combining cluster observables across wavelengths can both test and inform our knowledge of such scaling relations. As a pilot program for future explorations of the combined SPT and DES datasets, we explore the relation between the optical-richness, lambda, and SZ-signal for a sample of 567 optically-selected clusters from the Blanco Cosmology Survey, an ~ 80 square-degree survey located within the SPT-SZ survey. In this study we detect SZ-signal at increasing significance as a function of cluster richness but find that the recovered signal falls below expectations derived from models based on X-ray samples. We explore possible biases to our recovered signal and find that contamination from cluster members -- in particular radio and dust emission from galaxies--is small and that the majority of the discrepancy at the high mass end can be explained by errors in identifying the optical centers of clusters. The toolset developed here can be combined with future cluster catalogs from the Dark Energy Survey to help improve mass-richness scaling relations and ultimately constrain cosmological models.

Abstract: Galaxy clusters play an important role in understanding the formation of structure in the Universe and can be used to constrain cosmological parameters. Thousands of clusters are known in the nearby Universe, but few are confirmed at large distances. Remote clusters provide a view of the early Universe, and are important for studying galaxy evolution. Here, I describe a technique for finding distant clusters using bent, double-lobed radio galaxies. These radio sources are active galactic nuclei (AGN) that result from outflows of material surrounding supermassive black holes in the centers of massive galaxies. These outflows are typically bent as a result of the relative motion between the host galaxy and the surrounding hot gas that fills clusters. Using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty-centimeters ( FIRST ) survey, I determine the frequency with which bent radio sources are associated with rich galaxy clusters in the nearby Universe (z 0.5), as compared to non-bent radio sources. I find that 60% of bent radio sources are located in rich cluster environments, compared to 10 - 20% of non-bent radio sources. Therefore, bent radio sources are efficient tracers for clusters and are useful as beacons of clusters at large distances. Bent radio sources may achieve their morphologies through large-scale cluster mergers that set the intracluster medium (ICM) in motion. Using a suite of substructure tests, I determine the significance of optical substructure in clusters containing radio sources. I find no preference for substructure in clusters with bent double-lobed sources compared to other types of radio sources, indicating that bent sources will not necessarily preferentially select clusters undergoing recent large-scale mergers. Having established that bent radio sources efficiently locate clusters, I have obtained deep, follow-up observations at optical and near-infrared wavelengths to uncover associated distant cluster candidates. In addition, a large Spitzer Space Telescope survey is underway to observe all bent sources not detected in the SDSS. Follow-up observations reveal a large number of high-redshift candidates. Further study of these objects will lend insight into galaxy formation and evolution and feedback between an AGN and its environment at high-redshift for clusters with a range of masses.

Current and near-future galaxy cluster surveys at a variety of wavelengths are expected to provide a promising way to obtain precision measurements of the growth of structure over cosmic time. This in turn would serve as an important precision probe of cosmology. However, to realize the full potential of these surveys, systematic uncertainties arising from, for example, cluster mass estimates and sample selection must be well understood. This work follows several different approaches towards alleviating these uncertainties. Cluster sample selection is investigated in the context of arcminute-resolution millimeter-wavelength surveys such as the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) and the South Pole Telescope (SPT). Large-area, realistic simulations of the microwave sky are constructed and cluster detection is simulated using a multi-frequency Wiener filter to separate the galaxy clusters, via their Sunyaev-Zel'dovich signal, from other contaminating microwave signals. Using this technique, an ACT-like survey can expect to obtain a cluster sample that is 90% complete and 85% pure above a mass of 3 x 10^14 Msun. Cluster mass uncertainties are explored by comparing X-ray and weak-lensing mass estimates for shear-selected galaxy clusters in the Deep Lens Survey (DLS) to study possible biases in using cluster baryons or weak-lensing shear as tracers of the cluster total mass. Results are presented for four galaxy clusters that comprise the top-ranked shear-selected system in the DLS, and for three of these clusters there is agreement between X-ray and weak-lensing mass estimates. For the fourth cluster, the X-ray mass estimate is higher than that from weak-lensing by 2-sigma, and X-ray images suggest this cluster may be undergoing a merger with a smaller cluster, which may be biasing the X-ray mass estimate high. The feasibility of measuring galaxy cluster peculiar velocities using an ACT-like instrument is also investigated. Such a possibility would allow one to measure structure growth via large-scale velocity fields and circumvent the uncertainties associated with measuring cluster masses. We show that such measurements are possible and yield statistical uncertainties of roughly 100 km/sec given either a temperature prior with 1-sigma errors of less than 2 keV or additional lower frequency millimeter-band observations.

Clusters of Galaxies are the largest gravitationally bound systems known. Discovered by Charles Messier in the XVIII century, they started to be systematically studied two hundred years later, when Abell and Zwicky undertook a series of surveys to identify concentrations of galaxies in the accessible Universe. These initial studies concluded that clusters of galaxies were formed by objects with the same visual colors and used them to establish memberships. This has been since then one of the biggest issues in this field: the accurate separation of cluster population versus projected foreground or background objects. One other issue is to establish the dynamical status of both the cluster itself and the sources within. From the latter, the former can be inferred, even by crude assumptions on the typical mass of the galaxies, since the velocity dispersion of the members and the cluster radius are linked via the Virial Theorem. However, early observations from spaceborne telescopes discovered significant extended X–ray emission from the cluster cores that was soon identified as Bremsstrahlung radiation in the di use intracluster plasma. The detection of such hot gas led to the calculation of the potential well needed to keep it bound to the system and the amount of gas required. Both estimates, from optical and X–ray data disagreed by up to (and even beyond) 70% in some cases. At the same time, the characteristics of the cluster population were studied and compared to field galaxies. It was found that cluster members favoured elliptical morphologies, larger masses and red colours, versus the dominant fraction of blue mid size spirals in the field. Moreover, the fraction of blue galaxies was found to vary along the clustercentric distance and with redshift, increasing this blue fraction directly with both. It was established that clusters of galaxies harboured much more mass that that directly observable in optical wavelengths and that their members had undergone or were undergoing transformations that made their evolutionary path diverge from their counterparts in the field. To appropriately address those issues a key observable was demanded: accurate redshifts. However, that was found hard to get. On the one hand, photometric redshifts by themselves lack of the precision needed to establish whether a galaxy is within the cluster or not. On the other, spectroscopic redshifts are extremely demanding in terms of observation time and the selection of objects imply some a-priori criteria that may significantly bias the result, focusing in typical cluster members and eventually overlooking objects in the ends of the distribution function of luminosities and colors...