Sunyaev–zel’dovich Cluster Profiles Measured With the South Pole Telescope

ABSTRACT We present Sunyaev–Zel'dovich (SZ) measurements of 15 massive X-ray-selected galaxy clusters obtained with the South Pole Telescope (SPT). The SZ cluster signals are measured at 150 GHz, and concurrent 220 GHz data are used to reduce astrophysical contamination. Radial profiles are computed using a technique that takes into account the effects of the beams and filtering. In several clusters, significant SZ decrements are detected out to a substantial fraction of the virial radius. The profiles are fit to the β-model and to a generalized Navarro–Frenk–White (NFW) pressure profile, and are scaled and stacked to probe their average behavior. We find model parameters that are consistent with previous studies: β = 0.86 and r core / r 500 = 0.20 for the β-model, and (α n , β n , γ n , c 500 ) = (1.0, 5.5, 0.5, 1.0) for the generalized NFW model. Both models fit the SPT data comparably well, and both are consistent with the average SZ profile out to beyond r 500 . The integrated Compton- y parameter Y SZ is computed for each cluster using both model-dependent and model-independent techniques, and the results are compared to X-ray estimates of cluster parameters. We find that Y SZ scales with Y X and gas mass with low scatter. Since these observables have been found to scale with total mass, our results point to a tight mass–observable relation for the SPT cluster survey.