Dynamical Boson Stars.
The idea of stable, localized bundles of energy has strong appeal as a model for particles. In the 1950s, John Wheeler envisioned such bundles as smooth configurations of electromagnetic energy that he calledgeons, but none were found. Instead, particle-like solutions were found in the late 1960s with the addition of a scalar field, and these were given the nameboson stars. Since then, boson stars find use in a wide variety of models as sources of dark matter, as black hole mimickers, in simple models of binary systems, and as a tool in finding black holes in higher dimensions with only a single Killing vector. We discuss important varieties of boson stars, their dynamic properties, and some of their uses, concentrating on recent efforts.
Long Island University, Brookville, NY 11548 USA ; Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 2Y5 Canada.
Steven L
SL
Liebling
Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H8 Canada.
Carlos
C
Palenzuela