  We investigate how ellipticity, asymmetries and substructures separately
affect the ability of galaxy clusters to produce strong lensing events, i.e.
gravitational arcs, and how they influence the arc morphologies and fluxes.
This is important for those studies aiming, for example, at constraining
cosmological parameters from statistical lensing, or at determining the inner
structure of galaxy clusters through gravitational arcs. We do so by creating
two-dimensional gradually smoothed, differently elliptical and asymmetric
versions of some numerical models. On average, we find that the contributions
of ellipticity, asymmetries and substructures amount to ~40%, ~10% and ~30% of
the total strong lensing cross section, respectively. However, our analysis
shows that substructures play a more important role in less elliptical and
asymmetric clusters, even if located at large distances from the cluster
centers (~1Mpc/h). Conversely, their effect is less important in highly
asymmetric lenses. The morphology, position and flux of individual arcs are
strongly affected by the presence of substructures in the clusters. Removing
substructures on spatial scales <~50kpc/h, roughly corresponding to mass scales
<~5 10^{10}M_\odot/h, alters the image multiplicity of ~35% of the sources used
in the simulations and causes position shifts larger than 5'' for ~40% of the
arcs longer than 5''. We conclude that any model for cluster lens cannot
neglect the effects of ellipticity, asymmetries and substructures. On the other
hand, the high sensitivity of gravitational arcs to deviations from regular,
smooth and symmetric mass distributions suggests that strong gravitational
lensing is potentially a powerfull tool to measure the level of substructures
and asymmetries in clusters.
