2:30pm Monday January 31 in Curia II
Photometric redshifts are revolutionizing cluster finding, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey provides a nearly ideal data set. I will survey the modern photo-z cluster finding techniques, and compare them to current x-ray selection techniques. I've been developing a new technique, called maxBcg, that is an inherently color-based and quite powerful; I'll describe this in some detail. The cluster catalog produced has the usual cluster positions and richness/mass estimates, but more interestingly the redshifts (with 0.02 rms accuracy) out to z=0.6. Redshifts of this accuracy makes cosmography possible, and provides new leverage on such classic problems as the abundance of clusters as a function of mass, the evolution of the mass function, and power spectrum estimates.