ARCRAIDER. I. Detailed optical and X-ray analysis of the cooling flow cluster Z3146

We present a detailed analysis of the medium redshift (z = 0.2906) galaxy cluster Z3146 which is part of the ongoing ARCRAIDER project, a systematic search for gravitational arcs in massive clusters of galaxies. The analysis of Z3146 is based on deep optical wide field observations in the B, V and R bands obtained with the WFI@ESO2.2m, and shallow archival WFPC2@HST taken with the F606W filter, which are used for strong as well as weak lensing analyses. Additionally we have used publicly available XMM/Newton observations for a detailed X-ray analysis of Z3146. Both methods, lensing and X-ray, were used to determine the dynamical state and to estimate the total mass. We also identified four gravitational arc candidates. We find this cluster to be in a relaxed state, which is confirmed by a large cooling flow with nominal ~1600 M_⊙ per year, regular galaxy density and light distributions and a regular shape of the weak lensing mass reconstruction. The mass content derived with the different methods agrees well within 25% at r200=1661 h70^-1 kpc indicating a velocity dispersion of σ_v=869+124-153 km s^-1.