Revisiting the AdS boson stars: The mass-charge relations

Motivated by the recent progress in solving the large charge sector of conformal field theories, we revisit the mass-charge relation of boson stars asymptotic to global anti-de Sitter. We construct and classify a large number of electrically charged boson star solutions in a toy model and two supergravity models arising from the SU(3) and U(1)(4) truncation of D = 4 SO(8) gauged maximal supergravity. We find a simple ansatz for the chemical potential that can fit the numerical data in striking accuracy for the full range of charge. Combining with the first law of thermodynamics, we can then evaluate the mass as a function of the charge and obtain the free energy in the fixed charge ensemble. We show that in the toy model, the ground state can be either the extremal Reissner-Nordstrom (RN) black hole or the boson stars depending on the parameter region. For the SU(3) truncation, there always exists a boson star that has smaller free energy than the extremal RN black hole, in contrast to the U(1)(4) model where the extremal RN black hole is always the ground state. In all models, for boson star solutions with arbitrarily large charge, we show that the large charge expansion of the mass reproduces the same structure exhibited in the conformal field theory side.