Proca stars in excited states

TL;DR

This paper investigates excited states of Proca stars, revealing their inherent instability and possible evolution into black holes, dissipation, or ground state migration through non-linear dynamical simulations.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of the stability and dynamical evolution of excited Proca star configurations in spherical symmetry.

Findings

Excited Proca stars are always unstable to small perturbations.

Their evolution can result in black hole formation, dissipation, or migration to the ground state.

Migration to the ground state occurs only in a small parameter space with negative binding energy.

Abstract

In this paper we consider families of solutions for excited states of Proca stars in spherical symmetry. We focus on the first two excited configurations and perform a series of fully non-linear dynamical simulations in order to study their properties and stability. Our analysis reveals that excited Proca stars are always unstable against even very small perturbations, and their dynamical evolution can lead to three different final states: collapse to a black hole, dissipation, or migration to a different configuration in the ground state. We find that migration to the ground state can only occur in a small region of the parameter space of solutions with negative binding energy.