CENTRA Seminar - Effective boson stars - 14 abril 2016

Boson stars are self-gravitating solutions made entirely of fundamental, massive bosonic fields.

I shall give a general overview on boson stars, discussing their existence and stability, and their possible astrophysical applications, e.g. black hole mimickers and dark matter candidates.

Then I shall briefly discuss the instability of such boson stars in higher dimensions.

Eventually, I shall present a new class of boson stars solutions, namely effective boson stars, arising from the compactification of higher-dimensional theories. These configurations are effectively built from various scalars with different masses, corresponding to the tower of Kaluza-Klein masses emerging upon compactification, and there exists strong evidence of their stability.