Nuclei Using Topological Solitons: Skyrmions and rho Mesons

Abstract

The Skyrme model is a low-energy effective field theory of strong interactions where nuclei and baryons appear as topological solitons, more concretely as collective excitations of pionic degrees of freedom. In the last years, there has been a revival of Skyrme’s ideas and new related models have been proposed to overcome two of the main drawbacks of the theory, namely, the too large binding energies and the lack of cluster structures. In this paper, we shortly review how to address both issues by extending the standard Skyrme model with the inclusion of the rho meson and how important the pion mass contribution is.