Speaker
Description
Through gas and stars bound within their gravitational potentials, the millions of massive dark matter halos that thread the web in our sky imprint arcminute-scale features across the electromagnetic spectrum. As surveys from radio to X-ray increase their grasp, populations of galaxy clusters grow in size and fidelity. In this talk I will review a simple, functional model for linking the underlying population of massive halos to population properties of observed cluster samples. Features of this model extracted from cosmological simulations will be highlighted, with particular emphasis on "mass-proxy quality" of observable properties. I will close with some speculative thoughts on how machine learning methods might improve our understanding of the "cluster-halo connection".
