We examine the incidence of cold fronts in a large sample of galaxy clusters extracted from a ( 512 h ^ { -1 } Mpc ) hydrodynamic/N-body cosmological simulation with adiabatic gas physics computed with the Enzo adaptive mesh refinement code .
This simulation contains a sample of roughly 4000 galaxy clusters with M \geq 10 ^ { 14 } M _ { \odot } at z =0 .
For each simulated galaxy cluster , we have created mock 0.3-8.0 keV X-ray observations and spectroscopic-like temperature maps .
We have searched these maps with a new automated algorithm to identify the presence of cold fronts in projection .
Using a threshold of a minimum of 10 cold front pixels in our images , corresponding to a total comoving length L _ { cf } > 156 h ^ { -1 } kpc , we find that roughly 10-12 % of all projections in a mass-limited sample would be classified as cold front clusters .
Interestingly , the fraction of clusters with extended cold front features in our synthetic maps of a mass-limited sample trends only weakly with redshift out to z =1.0 .
However , when using different selection functions , including a simulated flux limit , the trending with redshift changes significantly .
The likelihood of finding cold fronts in the simulated clusters in our sample is a strong function of cluster mass .
In clusters with M > 7.5 \times 10 ^ { 14 } M _ { \odot } the cold front fraction is 40-50 % .
We also show that the presence of cold fronts is strongly correlated with disturbed morphology as measured by quantitative structure measures .
Finally , we find that the incidence of cold fronts in the simulated cluster images is strongly dependent on baryonic physics .