Stability of charged solitons and formation of boson stars in five-dimensional anti-de Sitter spacetime

Abstract

We study the stability of charged solitons in five-dimensional anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime. We show that for appropriate choices of the parameters of the model these solutions become unstable to form scalar hair. We find that the existence of charged solitons with scalar hair depends crucially on the charge and the mass of the scalar field. We investigate the dependence of the spectrum of solutions on the mass of the scalar field in detail. For positive mass of the scalar field, the hairy solitons can be interpreted as charged boson stars. We find that for a sufficiently small value of the charge of the scalar field a ‘forbidden band’ of the boson star’s mass and charge exists, while all our results indicate that—contrary to the asymptotically flat spacetime case—boson stars in asymptotic AdS can have arbitrarily large charge and mass.