Angularly excited and interacting boson stars and Q balls

We study angularly excited as well as interacting nontopological solitons, the so-called Q balls, and their gravitating counterparts, the so-called boson stars, in 3+1 dimensions. Q balls and boson stars carry a nonvanishing Noether charge and arise as solutions of complex scalar field models in a flat space-time background and coupled minimally to gravity, respectively. We present examples of interacting Q balls that arise due to angular excitations, which are closely related to the spherical harmonics. We also construct explicit examples of rotating boson stars that interact with nonrotating boson stars. We observe that rotating boson stars tend to absorb the nonrotating ones for increasing, but reasonably small gravitational coupling. This is a new phenomenon as compared to the flat space-time limit and is related to the negative contribution of the rotation term to the energy density of the solutions. In addition, our results indicate that a system of a rotating and nonrotating boson star can become unstable if the direct interaction term in the potential is large enough. This instability is related to the appearance of ergoregions.