ON THE CONNECTION BETWEEN GIANT RADIO HALOS AND CLUSTER MERGERS

Abstract

The frequently observed association between giant radio halos (RHs) and merging galaxy clusters has driven present theoretical models of non-thermal emission from galaxy clusters, which are based on the idea that the energy dissipated during cluster-cluster mergers could power the formation of RHs. To quantitatively test the merger-halo connection, we present the first statistical study based on deep radio data and X-ray observations of a complete X-ray-selected sample of galaxy clusters with X-ray luminosity >=5 × 1044 erg s-1 and redshift 0.2