paper

Intrinsic pressure anisotropy in spherical Proca stars

arXiv:2609.12773 · doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2026.140940

Abstract

Pressure anisotropy in relativistic stars is commonly prescribed through a phenomenological closure, obscuring its microscopic origin and relation to stress-energy conservation. Here it is derived directly from the minimally coupled Einstein-complex-Proca theory. For spherical Proca stars, the principal-pressure difference admits an exact on-shell form whose sign is controlled solely by the local mass-shell threshold. The stress is radially dominated in the core, reverses on a surface of fixed gravitational redshift, and becomes tangentially dominated in the envelope. At the first mass maximum, the fractional anisotropy reaches about 21% near the density maximum, whilst the region beyond the reversal contains about 9% of the mass. Its exact atmospheric limit is approximately 24%, equal in magnitude and opposite in sign to the scalar-boson-star limit. Because the usual local fluid variables remain non-zero at the crossing, no sign-definite closure constructed from them can reproduce the profile. These results identify an intrinsically vectorial stress reversal, generated without additional interactions, and provide a first-principles benchmark for anisotropic bosonic compact objects.

9 pages, 3 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication in Physics Letters B

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