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Description
We present a catalogue of 348 galaxy clusters and groups with 0.2<z<1.2 selected in the 2.78deg^2^ Advanced Large, Homogeneous Area Medium Band Redshift Astronomical (ALHAMBRA) survey. The high precision of our photometric redshifts, close to 1 percent, and the wide spread of the seven ALHAMBRA pointings ensure that this catalogue has better mass sensitivity and is less affected by cosmic variance than comparable samples. The detection has been carried out with the Bayesian Cluster Finder, whose performance has been checked in ALHAMBRA-like light-cone mock catalogues. Great care has been taken to ensure that the observable properties of the mocks photometry accurately correspond to those of real catalogues. From our simulations, we expect to detect galaxy clusters and groups with both 70 percent completeness and purity down to dark matter halo masses of M_h_~3x10^13^M_{sun}_ for z<0.85. Cluster redshifts are expected to be recovered with ~0.6 percent precision for z<1. We also expect to measure cluster masses with sigma_Mh_|M*CL_~0.25-0.35dex precision down to ~3x10^13^M_{sun}_, masses which are 50 percent smaller than those reached by similar work. We have compared these detections with previous optical, spectroscopic and X-rays work, finding an excellent agreement with the rates reported from the simulations. We have also explored the overall properties of these detections such as the presence of a colour-magnitude relation, the evolution of the photometric blue fraction and the clustering of these sources in the different ALHAMBRA fields. Despite the small numbers, we observe tentative evidence that, for a fixed stellar mass, the environment is playing a crucial role at lower redshifts (z<0.5).
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