The idea of stable, localized bundles of energy has strong appeal as a model for particles. In the 1950s, John Wheeler envisioned such bundles as smooth configurations of electromagnetic energy that he called geons, but none were found. Instead, particle-like solutions were found in the late 1960s with the addition of a scalar field, and these were given the name boson stars. Since then, boson stars find use in a wide variety of models as sources of dark matter, as black hole mimickers, in simple models of binary systems, and as a tool in finding black holes in higher dimensions with only a single Killing vector. We discuss important varieties of boson stars, their dynamic properties, and some of their uses, concentrating on recent efforts.

稳定、局域能量束的想法作为粒子模型具有很强的吸引力。在 20 世纪 50 年代，约翰·惠勒 (John Wheeler) 将这种束设想为电磁能的平滑结构，他称之为吉子 (geons)，但最终没有找到。相反，在 20 世纪 60 年代末发现了添加标量场的类粒子解决方案，这些解决方案被命名为玻色子星。从那时起，玻色子星在各种模型中得到应用，作为暗物质的来源，作为黑洞模仿者，在双星系统的简单模型中，以及作为仅用单个杀伤矢量寻找更高维度黑洞的工具。我们讨论了玻色子星的重要种类、它们的动态特性以及它们的一些用途，重点关注最近的努力。