Abstract
We review recent work on the modelling of atomic nuclei as quantized Skyrmions, using Skyrme's original model with pion fields only. Skyrmions are topological soliton solutions whose conserved topological charge B is identified with the baryon number of a nucleus. Apart from an energy and length scale, the Skyrme model has just one dimensionless parameter m proportional to the pion mass. It has been found that a good fit to experimental nuclear data requires m to be of order 1. The Skyrmions for B up to 7 have been known for some time, and are qualitatively insensitive to whether m is zero or of order 1. However, for baryon numbers B = 8 and above, the Skyrmions have quite a compact structure for m of order 1, rather than the hollow polyhedral structure found when m = 0. One finds that for baryon numbers which are multiples of four, the Skyrmions are composed of B = 4 sub-units, as in the α-particle model of nuclei.
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