Boson stars with generic self-interactions

TL;DR

This paper investigates boson star configurations with general self-interactions beyond the standard model, analyzing their stability and observational signatures, and finds that such interactions cause only minor variations in star properties.

Contribution

It introduces a broader class of self-interaction potentials for boson stars and examines their effects on stability and observable phenomena.

Findings

Mass and particle number are similar to standard models, with minor differences.

Stability properties are analyzed using catastrophe theory.

Observational signatures like gravitational redshift and lensing are compared with standard cases.

Abstract

We study boson star configurations with generic, but not non-topological, self-interaction terms, i.e. we do not restrict ourselves just to consider the standard $\lambda |\psi|^4$ interaction but more general U(1)-symmetry-preserving profiles. We find that when compared with the usual potential, similar results for masses and number of particles appear. However, changes are of order of few percent of the star masses. We explore the stability properties of the configurations, that we analyze using catastrophe theory. We also study possible observational outputs: gravitational redshifts, rotation curves of accreted particles, and lensing phenomena, and compare with the usual case.