A High Fidelity Sample of Cold Front Clusters from the Chandra Archive
  This paper presents a sample of "cold front" clusters selected from the
Chandra archive. The clusters are selected based purely on the existence of
surface brightness edges in their Chandra images which are modeled as density
jumps. A combination of the derived density and temperature jumps across the
fronts is used to select nine robust examples of cold front clusters:
1ES0657-558, Abell 1201, Abell 1758N, MS1455.0+2232, Abell 2069, Abell 2142,
Abell 2163, RXJ1720.1+2638, and Abell 3667. This sample is the subject of an
ongoing study aimed at relating cold fronts to cluster merger activity, and
understanding how the merging environment affects the cluster constituents.
Here, temperature maps are presented along with the Chandra X-ray images. A
dichotomy is found in the sample in that there exists a subsample of cold front
clusters which are clearly mergers based on their X-ray morphologies, and a
second subsample which harbor cold fronts, but have surprisingly relaxed X-ray
morphologies, and minimal evidence for merger activity at other wavelengths.
For this second subsample, the existence of a cold front provides the sole
evidence for merger activity at X-ray wavelengths. We discuss how cold fronts
can provide additional information which may be used to constrain merger
histories, and also the possibility of using cold fronts to distinguish major
and minor mergers.
