English

Angularly excited and interacting boson stars and Q-balls

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2010-04-15 v2 High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We study angularly excited as well as interacting non-topological solitons, so-called Q-balls and their gravitating counterparts, so-called boson stars in 3+1 dimensions. Q-balls and boson stars carry a non-vanishing Noether charge and arise as solutions of complex scalar field models in a flat space-time background and coupled minimally to gravity, respectively. We present examples of interacting Q-balls that arise due to angular excitations, which are closely related to the spherical harmonics. We also construct explicit examples of rotating boson stars that interact with non-rotating boson stars. We observe that rotating boson stars tend to absorb the non-rotating ones for increasing, but reasonably small gravitational coupling. This is a new phenomenon as compared to the flat space-time limit and is related to the negative contribution of the rotation term to the energy density of the solutions. In addition, our results indicate that a system of a rotating and non-rotating boson star can become unstable if the direct interaction term in the potential is large enough. This instability is related to the appearance of ergoregions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0812.3968,
  title  = {Angularly excited and interacting boson stars and Q-balls},
  author = {Yves Brihaye and Betti Hartmann},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0812.3968},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

20 pages including 9 figures; for higher quality figures please contact the authors; v2: minor changes, final version to appear in Phys. Rev. D

R2 v1 2026-06-21T11:54:29.577Z