Gas–Lensing Alignment in the Frontier Fields

SUPERSESSION NOTICE (added by the author, July 2026): The core prediction of this framework - universal positive alignment between intracluster entropy gradients and strong-lensing structure - was subsequently tested by the author against deep archival Chandra X-ray stacks and the public lens models of all six Hubble Frontier Fields clusters. The prediction is excluded in every cluster where the test has statistical power, and the activation equation was additionally found to be circular as a test of lensing, since it is built from lensing-derived quantities. This record is retained unaltered below as a dated register of the original hypothesis. A byproduct of the falsification effort - a radius-matched arc-rank statistic detecting azimuthal co-alignment between lensed arcs and mesoscale diffuse X-ray substructure (strongest in MACS J0416, p ~ 5e-5), fully consistent with standard LCDM cosmology and requiring no new physics - is in preparation for separate publication. Contact: anthonycolmenaresanandres@gmail.com The Latent Matter Hypothesis (LMH) v5.3 reinterprets dark matter as a dormant state of ordinary matter, activated by entropy gradients and spacetime curvature. This theory unifies lensing, black holes, and dark matter behavior through a gravitationally responsive activation function. The release includes a full summary, mathematical model, observational validations using AGN catalogs, and a reinterpretation of Hawking radiation under the LMH-RH submodel. All content is released under Creative Commons to encourage scientific and public engagement.