Boson stars: a quantum Monte Carlo approach

Dark matter could manifest as boson stars, i.e., macroscopic gravitationally bound Bose-Einstein condensates. These exotic structures are coherent at the macroscopic scale, as usual in Bose-Einstein condensates. Their ground state properties have been studied via the Gross-Pitaevskii equation to address their properties, thus treating the problem from a mean-field approach or via variational ansatz. In this work, we use quantum Monte Carlo techniques such as variational Monte Carlo and Diffusion Monte Carlo to study the ground state properties of boson stars beyond the mean-field approach and characterize the ground state energy, geometry, and structure of boson stars.