%0 Journal Article
%T Dynamical Boson Stars
%A Steven L. Liebling
%A Carlos Palenzuela
%J Living Reviews in Relativity
%D 2012
%I Max-Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics
%X The idea of stable, localized bundles of energy has strong appeal as a model for particles. In the 1950s, John Wheeler envisioned such bundles as smooth configurations of electromagnetic energy that he called geons, but none were found. Instead, particle-like solutions were found in the late 1960s with the addition of a scalar field, and these were given the name boson stars. Since then, boson stars find use in a wide variety of models as sources of dark matter, as black hole mimickers, in simple models of binary systems, and as a tool in finding black holes in higher dimensions with only a single Killing vector. We discuss important varieties of boson stars, their dynamic properties, and some of their uses, concentrating on recent efforts.
%K Numerical relativity
%K Boson stars
%U http://www.livingreviews.org/lrr-2012-6