Head-on collisions and orbital mergers of Proca stars

Proca stars, aka vector boson stars, are self-gravitating Bose-Einstein condensates obtained as numerical stationary solutions of the Einstein-(complex)-Proca system. These solitonic objects can achieve a compactness comparable to that of black holes, thus yielding an example of a black hole mimicker, which, moreover, can be both stable and form dynamically from generic initial data by the mechanism of gravitational cooling. In this paper we further explore the dynamical properties of these solitonic objects by performing both head-on collisions and orbital mergers of equal mass Proca stars, using fully nonlinear numerical evolutions. For the head-on collisions, we show that the end point and the gravitational waveform from these collisions depends on the compactness of the Proca star. Proca stars with sufficiently small compactness collide emitting gravitational radiation and leaving a stable Proca star remnant. But more compact Proca stars collide to form a transient hypermassive Proca star, which ends up decaying into a black hole, albeit temporarily surrounded by Proca quasibound states. The unstable intermediate stage can leave an imprint in the waveform, making it distinct from that of a head-on collision of black holes. The final quasinormal ringing matches that of Schwarzschild black hole, even though small deviations may occur, as a signature of sufficiently nonlinear and long-lived Proca quasibound states. For the orbital mergers, we have considered eccentric orbits and the outcome also depends on the compactness of the stars. For the binaries with the most compact stars, the binary merger forms a Kerr black hole which retains part of the initial orbital angular momentum, being surrounded by a transient Proca field remnant; in cases with lower compactness, the binary merger forms a massive Proca star with angular momentum, but out of equilibrium. As in previous studies of (scalar) boson stars, the angular momentum of such objects appears to converge to zero as a final equilibrium state is approached.