Gravitational scattering of solitonic boson stars: Analytics vs Numerics

TL;DR

This paper compares analytical and numerical methods to study the scattering of boson-star binaries, revealing the dominant effects and deriving an effective-one-body potential crucial for gravitational-wave modeling.

Contribution

It provides the first effective-one-body potential for boson-star binaries by matching analytical predictions with numerical simulations.

Findings

Good agreement between analytics and numerics for scattering angles.

In-phase binaries exhibit attractive interactions, out-of-phase show repulsive effects.

Derived effective-one-body potential essential for gravitational-wave templates.

Abstract

We study the scattering of boson-star binaries, taking into account three effects: point-mass gravitational, tidal, and short-range scalar-field interactions. We compare analytic results to the scattering angle extracted from four sequences of numerical-relativity simulations at fixed energy and varying impact parameter. The very good agreement exhibits the attractive (repulsive) effect of in-phase (out-of-phase) binaries, wich dominates at small impact parameters. We thus obtain the first effective-one-body potential, central for the construction of analytic gravitational-wave templates.