Living Reviews in Relativity: "Dynamical boson stars" by Liebling & Palenzuela

Liebling, Steven L. & Palenzuela, Carlos, Dynamical boson stars, Living Rev Relativ (2017) 20: 5. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41114-017-0007-y

Open Access | Review Article

First Online: 13 November 2017

This article is a revised version of https://doi.org/10.12942/lrr-2012-6.

The current version includes many more references and a more detailed discussion of a number of issues that include both more work in different aspects of boson stars, as well as the fact that gravitational waves have finally been detected, which makes several aspects of this review more relevant. The new sections include a discussion on Proca stars, scalar hair on Kerr black holes, and a more detailed discussion on alternative theories of gravity, BS as compact alternative to black holes, as sources of gravitational waves, and as models of dark matter. The article is very complete, well written and very interesting. The authors have done an excellent work.

Abstract:

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 called geons, 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 name boson 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.