Non equilibrium dynamics of galaxy clusters

The thesis is focused on the dynamics of galaxies in the outskirts of galaxy clusters, where the matter is affected by an overall infall motion towards the cluster centre. Starting from the classical results of the spherical collapse model, we determined new theoretical constraints for the mass profile of clusters as a function of the cosmological parameters. We investigated the importance of the turnaround radius (i.e. the radius where the infall motion counterbalances the Hubble expansion motion) as well as the possibility of directly extracting the mass profile from the infall velocity pattern of member galaxies. The theoretical results were applied to a sample of simulated clusters (Borgani et al. 2004, Biviano et al. 2006) to keep the 3-dimensional dynamics under control. We demonstrated that: (1) most clusters are compatible with a single mass profile in the external region (provided their size and mass are normalized to the turnaround scale); (2) it is possible to extract the individual mass profiles of clusters using a selected subset of galaxies identified on their redshift-position distribution; (3) the Jeans equation and the virial theorem must be corrected in the outskirts of clusters to take into account the overall infall motion of matter. Taking advantage of these results, we developed a new technique for estimating the mass profile in cluster outskirts which only relies on the observational properties of member galaxies. This technique turns out to be simpler and more reliable than the current methods and is suitable to be applied to observations.