Audience: Technical, cosmology/particle physics community

Senior Capstone project in physics, completed at the University of Cincinnati, April 2018.

Axions are elementary particles, which have zero spin and obey Bose statistics, that have been postulated to solve the strong CP problem in quantum chromodynamics, the theory of strong interactions. At low temperatures bosons condense in the same energy state and form Bose-Einstein Condensates, due to their quantum mechanical properties. Further, these condensates, or "axion stars", are gravitationally bound. It has been proposed that axion stars could be contributing to dark matter. Previous studies have found axion stars have a dilute metastable state with a critical mass of ~10^19 kg and a radius of ~200 km. By improving previous approximations of the configuration's energy, we determine a stable dense state exists at a radius of ~10 m. Furthermore, if the mass of the axion star is supercritical (including masses much greater than 10^19 kg), the star will begin to collapse from its dilute state to the dense state. As it contracts, the star will decay and rapidly emit relativistic axions.