Relative-Phase Control of Common-Bridge Survival in Collisions of Radially Excited Boson Stars

We show that the relative phase primarily controls the survival, rather than the initial formation, of the common bridge in head-on collisions of radially excited boson stars. We vary the relative phase and track the post-contact bridge evolution across different boson-star configurations and scalar potentials. In the benchmark, all sampled phases form a common bridge, while larger phase offsets reduce its persistence; the same suppression persists across the configurations and potentials studied.