Dr Katy Clough

Abstract:

Long-lived pseudo-solitonic objects, known as oscillons/oscillatons, which we collectively call real scalar stars, are ubiquitous in early Universe cosmology of scalar field theories. Typical examples are axions stars and moduli stars. Using numerical simulations in full general relativity to include the effects of gravity, we study the fate of real scalar stars and find that depending on the scalar potential they are either meta-stable or collapse to black holes. In particular we find that for KKLT potentials the configurations are meta-stable despite the asymmetry of the potential, consistently with the results from lattice simulations that do not include gravitational effects. For α-attractor potentials collapse to black holes is possible in a region of the parameter space where scalar stars would instead seem to be meta-stable or even disperse without including gravity. Each case gives rise to different cosmological implications which may affect the stochastic spectrum of gravitational waves.