Astrophysical signatures of boson stars: quasinormal modes and inspiral resonances

Compact bosonic field configurations, or boson stars, are promising dark matter candidates which have been invoked as an alternative description for the supermassive compact objects in active galactic nuclei. Boson stars can be comparable in size and mass to supermassive black holes and they are hard to distinguish by electromagnetic observations. However, boson stars do not possess an event horizon and their global spacetime structure is different from that of a black hole. This leaves a characteristic imprint in the gravitational-wave emission, which can be used as a discriminant between black holes and other horizonless compact objects. Here we perform a detailed study of boson stars and their gravitational-wave signatures in a fully relativistic setting, a study which was lacking in the existing literature in many respects. We construct several fully relativistic boson star configurations, and we analyze their geodesic structure and free oscillation spectra, or quasinormal modes. We explore the gravitational and scalar response of boson star spacetimes to an inspiralling stellar-mass object and compare it to its black hole counterpart. We find that a generic signature of compact boson stars is the resonant-mode excitation by a small compact object on stable quasi-circular geodesic motion.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figures. v2: minor corrections, version to be published in Phys. Rev. D. v3: final versio

Light rings as observational evidence for event horizons: long-lived modes, ergoregions and nonlinear instabilities of ultracompact objects

Ultracompact objects are self-gravitating systems with a light ring. It was recently suggested that fluctuations in the background of these objects are extremely long-lived and might turn unstable at the nonlinear level, if the object is not endowed with a horizon. If correct, this result has important consequences: objects with a light ring are black holes. In other words, the nonlinear instability of ultracompact stars would provide a strong argument in favor of the "black hole hypothesis," once electromagnetic or gravitational-wave observations confirm the existence of light rings. Here we explore in some depth the mode structure of ultracompact stars, in particular constant-density stars and gravastars. We show that the existence of very long-lived modes -- localized near a second, stable null geodesic -- is a generic feature of gravitational perturbations of such configurations. Already at the linear level, such modes become unstable if the object rotates sufficiently fast to develop an ergoregion. Finally, we conjecture that the long-lived modes become unstable under fragmentation via a Dyson-Chandrasekhar-Fermi mechanism at the nonlinear level. Depending on the structure of the star, it is also possible that nonlinearities lead to the formation of small black holes close to the stable light ring. Our results suggest that the mere observation of a light ring is a strong evidence for the existence of black holes.Comment: 10 pages, RevTeX

Alternative scheme to generate a supersinglet state of three-level atoms

In this paper we propose an alternative scheme to generate a supersinglet state of three three-level atoms via a single-mode of a cavity QED based on the two-photon transitions described by the 'full microscopical Hamiltonian approach'. In it, three three-level atoms prepared in suitable initial states are sequentially sent through the cavity originally prepared in its vacuum state. After an appropriate choice of the atom-cavity interaction times plus a field detection the state that describes the whole atom-field system is projected in the desired supersinglet state. The fidelity and success probability of the state as well as the practical feasibility of the scheme are discussed.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, 4 table