We construct boson stars in global anti–de Sitter (AdS) space and study their stability. Linear perturbation results suggest that the ground state along with the first three excited state boson stars are stable. We evolve some of these solutions and study their nonlinear stability in light of recent work [9], arguing that a weakly turbulent instability drives scalar perturbations of AdS to black hole formation. However, evolutions suggest that boson stars are nonlinearly stable and immune to the instability for sufficiently small perturbation. Furthermore, these studies find other families of initial data which similarly avoid the instability for sufficiently weak parameters. Heuristically, we argue that initial data families with widely distributed mass energy distort the spacetime sufficiently to oppose the coherent amplification favored by the instability. From the dual CFT perspective our findings suggest that there exist families of rather generic initial conditions in strongly coupled CFT (with large number of degrees of freedom) that do not thermalize in the infinite future.

• Received 22 April 2013

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.87.123006