The Lifetime of Axion Stars
Joshua Eby, Peter Suranyi, and L.C.R. Wijewardhana

TL;DR
This paper analyzes the decay mechanisms and stability conditions of axion stars, showing that weakly bound axion stars can have long lifetimes due to suppressed decay rates, and maps their stable parameter space.
Contribution
It provides a detailed calculation of axion star decay rates, demonstrating how binding energy affects their stability and survival over cosmological timescales.
Findings
Weakly bound axion stars have exponentially suppressed decay rates.
Stable axion star regions are mapped based on axion and star masses.
Strongly bound axion stars decay rapidly due to high momentum transfer.
Abstract
We investigate the decay of condensates of scalars in a field theory defined by , where and are the mass and decay constant of the scalar field. An example of such a theory is that of the axion, in which case the condensates are called axion stars. The axion field, , is self adjoint. As a result the axion number is not an absolutely conserved quantity. Therefore, axion stars are not stable and have finite lifetimes. Bound axions, localized on the volume of the star, have a coordinate uncertainty , where is the radius of the star and . Here and are the mass, and the ground state energy of the bound axion. Then the momentum distribution of axions has a width of . At strong binding, ,…
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