Toward Unbiased Galaxy Cluster Masses from Line of Sight Velocity
  Dispersions
  We study the use of red sequence selected galaxy spectroscopy for unbiased
estimation of galaxy cluster masses. We use the publicly available galaxy
catalog produced using the semi-analytic model of De Lucia & Blaizot (2007) on
the Millenium Simulation (Springel et al. 2005). We explore the impacts on
selection using galaxy color, projected separation from the cluster center, and
galaxy luminosity. We study the relationship between cluster mass and velocity
dispersion and identify and characterize the following sources of bias and
scatter: halo triaxiality, dynamical friction of red luminous galaxies and
interlopers. We show that due to halo triaxiality the intrinsic scatter of
estimated line of sight dynamical mass is about three times larger (30-40%)
than the one estimated using the 3D velocity dispersion (~12%) and a small bias
(~1%) is induced. We find evidence of increasing scatter as a function of
redshift and provide a fitting formula to account for it. We characterize the
amount of bias and scatter introduced by dynamical friction when using
subsamples of red-luminous galaxies to estimate the velocity dispersion. We
study the presence of interlopers in spectroscopic samples and their effect on
the estimated cluster dynamical mass. Our results show that while cluster
velocity dispersions extracted from a few dozen red sequence selected galaxies
do not provide precise masses on a single cluster basis, an ensemble of cluster
velocity dispersions can be combined to produce a precise calibration of a
cluster survey mass observable relation. Currently, disagreements in the
literature on simulated subhalo velocity dispersion mass relations place a
systematic floor on velocity dispersion mass calibration at the 15% level in
mass. We show that the selection related uncertainties are small by comparison,
providing hope that with further improvements this systematic floor can be
reduced.
