We study the scattering of boson-star binaries, taking into account three effects: point-mass gravitational, tidal, and short-range scalar-field interactions. We compare analytic results to the scattering angle extracted from four sequences of numerical-relativity simulations at fixed energy and varying impact parameter. The very good agreement exhibits the attractive (repulsive) effect of in-phase (out-of-phase) binaries, wich dominates at small impact parameters. We thus obtain the first effective-one-body potential, central for the construction of analytic gravitational-wave templates.
@article{arxiv.2512.00945,
title = {Gravitational scattering of solitonic boson stars: Analytics vs Numerics},
author = {Thibault Damour and Tamanna Jain and Ulrich Sperhake},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.00945},
year = {2025}
}