Boson Stars and Oscillatons: A Review

Abstract

Compact objects occupy a pivotal role in the exploration of Nature. The interest spans from the role of compact objects in astrophysics to their detection through various methods (gravitational waves interferometry, microlensing, imaging). While the existence of compact objects made of fermions (neutron stars and white dwarfs) has been assessed, a parallel search for localized solitons made of bosons is ongoing, stemming from Wheeler's original proposal of electromagnetic "geons". Boson fields can clump up and form compact objects such as boson stars (for complex scalar fields), oscillons and oscillatons (for real scalar fields), or Proca stars (for massive vector fields), which can show up in searches as black hole mimickers, dark matter sources, and a variety of other phenomena. I review some crucial properties of these bosonic systems, including recent progress in the field.

arXiv comment48 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. Matches the version accepted for publication on IJMPD

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Cited by in corpus (69)

• Horizon-scale tests of gravity theories and fundamental physics from the Event Horizon Telescope image of Sagittarius A${}^{\ast }$
• Dynamical Boson Stars
• Shadows of boson and Proca stars with thin accretion disks
• Superradiant evolution of the shadow and photon ring of Sgr A${}^{\star }$
• Gravitational waves and kicks from the merger of unequal mass, highly compact boson stars
• Bosonic Dark Matter in Light of the NICER Precise Mass-Radius Measurements
• Parasitic black holes: the swallowing of a fuzzy dark matter soliton
• Binary boson stars: Merger dynamics and formation of rotating remnant stars
• Exploring the distribution and impact of bosonic dark matter in neutron stars
• The Galactic Center as a laboratory for theories of gravity and dark matter
• Solar mass black holes from neutron stars and bosonic dark matter
• Boson stars and their relatives in semiclassical gravity
• Maximum mass of relativistic self-gravitating Bose-Einstein condensates with repulsive or attractive $|\phi {|}^4$ self-interaction
• Extreme $\ell$-boson stars
• Gravitational waves and neutrino oscillations in Chern-Simons axion gravity
• Constraints on the mass and self-coupling of Ultra-Light Scalar Field Dark Matter using observational limits on galactic central mass
• Bayesian analysis for rotational curves with $\ell$-boson stars as a dark matter component
• Self-interactions of ULDM to the rescue?
• Generic initial data for binary boson stars
• QCD Axion Kinetic Misalignment without Prejudice
• Self-Interacting Gravitational Atoms in the Strong-Gravity Regime
• Accretion disks and relativistic line broadening in boson star spacetimes
• Non-topological solitons and quasi-solitons
• Enhanced Early Galaxy Formation in JWST from Axion Dark Matter?
• Boson star head-on collisions with constraint-violating and constraint-satisfying initial data
• Critical gravitational collapse of a massive complex scalar field
• On the radial linear stability of nonrelativistic $\ell$-boson stars
• Stimulated decay of collapsing axion stars and fast radio bursts
• Unified view of scalar and vector dark matter solitons
• Compact stars admitting Finch-Skea symmetry in the presence of various matter fields
• Boson stars in massless and massive scalar-tensor gravity
• Radial stability of spherical bosonic stars and critical points
• Superradiant instabilities of massive bosons around exotic compact objects
• Thermodynamic Consistent Description of Compact Stars of Two Interacting Fluids: The Case of Neutron Stars with Higgs Portal Dark Matter
• Can Planet 9 be an Axion Star?
• On the linear stability of nonrelativistic selfinteracting boson stars
• Highly compact Proca stars with quartic self-interactions
• Echoes from bounded universes
• Magnetostatic boson stars
• Hair is complicated: Gravitational waves from stable and unstable boson-star mergers
• On the Galactic radio signal from stimulated decay of axion dark matter
• Novel standard candle: Collapsing axion stars
• Observational Probes of the Neutron Star Equation of State with Hyperons, Bosonic Dark Matter, and Quark Matter
• Ultracompact vector stars
• Diffuse X-Ray and Gamma-Ray Limits on Boson Stars that Interact with Nuclei
• Superfluid dark stars
• Detection of dilute axion stars with stimulated decay
• Interplay between Black Holes and Ultralight Dark Matter: Analytic Solutions
• Magnetic fields in inhomogeneous axion stars
• Higher order corrections to beyond-all-order effects in a fifth order Korteweg-de Vries equation
• Formation of a Bose Star in a Rotating Cloud
• Detecting dilute axion stars constrained by fast radio bursts in the Solar System via stimulated decay
• Dark photon dark matter from flattened axion potentials
• Nonrelativistic Proca stars: Spherical stationary and multi-frequency states
• Detectability of Massive Boson Stars using Gravitational Waves from Fundamental Oscillations
• Superfluidity in neutrino clusters
• Periodic Gravitational Lensing with Oscillating Boson Stars
• Dust stars in the minimal exponential measure model
• Fundamental oscillations as a tool to distinguish boson stars from neutron stars and black holes
• Nontopological Electromagnetic Hedgehogs
• Evolution of Mirror Axion Solitons
• Self-similar kinetics for gravitational Bose-Einstein condensation
• $\ell$-Boson stars in anti-de Sitter spacetime
• Anisotropic dispersion relation of ultralight Bose gases in modified Newtonian dynamics
• Constraint-satisfying binary boson star initial data via XCFC
• Resonant phenomena in finite motions of test particles in oscillating dark matter configurations
• A Faster Growth of Perturbations in an Early Matter Dominated Epoch: Primordial Black Holes and Gravitational Waves
• Soliton boson stars, Q-balls and the causal Buchdahl bound
• Statistical complexity as a probe of mass and phase structure in compact objects