Although the first expansion to nonlinear potentials was considered in [161] including fourth and sixth
power -terms, a deeper analysis was performed later considering a potential with only the quartic term
[57]
Many subsequent papers further analyze the EKG solutions with polynomial, or even more general
non-polynomial, potentials. One work in particular [195] studied the properties of the galactic dark matter
halos modeled with these boson stars. They found that a necessary condition to obtain stable, compact
solutions with an exponential decrease of the scalar field, the series expansion of these potentials must
contain the usual mass term .
More exotic ideas similarly try to include a pressure to increase the mass of BSs. Ref. [2] considers a form of repulsive self-interaction mediated by vector mesons within the mean-field approximation. However, the authors leave the solution of the fully nonlinear system of the Klein–Gordon and Proca equations to future work. Ref. [18] models stars made from the condensation of axions, using the semi-relativistic approach with two different potentials. Mathematically this approach involves averages such that the equations are equivalent to assuming the axion is constituted by a complex scalar field with harmonic time dependence.
Other generalizations of the potential allow for the presence of nontopological soliton solutions even in
the absence of gravity, with characteristics quite different than those of the mini-boson stars. In order to
obtain these solutions the potential must satisfy two conditions. First, it must be a function of to
preserve the global
invariance. Second, the potential should have an attractive term,
bounded from below and positive for
. These conditions imply a potential of at least
sixth order, a condition that is satisfied by the typical degenerate vacuum form [147, 89, 90]
The resulting soliton solution can be split in three different regions. When gravity is negligible, the
interior solution satisfies , followed by a shell of width
over which
changes from
to
zero, and an exterior that is essentially vacuum. This potential leads to a different scaling of the mass and
the radius than that of the ground state [149]
There is another type of non-topological soliton star, called Q-stars [155], which also admits soliton
solutions in the absence of gravity (i.e., Q-balls [56, 149]). The potential, besides being also a function of
, must satisfy the following conditions: it must behave like
near
, it has to be bounded
in an intermediate region and must be larger
for
. The Q-stars also have three
regions; an interior solution of radius
, (i.e.,
is the free particle inverse Compton
wavelength) a very thin surface region of thickness
, and finally the exterior solution without matter,
which reduces to Schwarzschild in spherical symmetry. The mass of these Q-stars scales now as
. The stability of these Q-stars has been studied recently using catastrophe theory,
such as [209, 135
]. Rotating, axisymmetric Q-balls were constructed in [133, 134]. Related,
rotating solutions in 2+1 with the signum-Gordon equation instead of the KG equation are found
in [10].
Other interesting works have studied the formation of Q-balls by the Affleck–Dine mechanism [125], their dynamics in one, two and three spatial dimensions [22], and their viability as a self-interacting dark matter candidate [139].
Ref. [29] considers a chemical potential to construct BSs, arguing that the effect of the chemical potential is to reduce the parameter space of stable solutions. Related work modifies the kinetic term of the action instead of the potential. Ref. [1] studies the resulting BSs for a class of K field theories, finding solutions of two types: (i) compact balls possessing a naked singularity at their center and (ii) compact shells with a singular inner boundary which resemble black holes. Ref. [3] considers coherent states of a scalar field instead of a BS within k-essence in the context of explaining dark matter. Ref. [72] modifies the kinetic term with just a minus sign to convert the scalar field to a phantom field. Although, a regular real scalar field has no spherically symmetric, local static solutions, they find such solutions with a real phantom scalar field.
http://www.livingreviews.org/lrr-2012-6 |
Living Rev. Relativity 15, (2012), 6
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