What exactly is a Skyrmion?

In connection with the possibility of skyrmion production from small domain disoriented chiral condensates formation from heavy ion collisions, the direct relation of a classical skyrmion to baryon states is examined. It is argued that a skyrmion is a coherent state of baryons. The collective coordinate approach of quantization means that the physical baryon states exist not in flat space but on a compact manifold. This requires the construction of coherent states in such a c...

I discuss recent development on the description of heavy-quark (such as charmed and bottom) baryons as one or more heavy mesons "wrapped" by a skyrmion. Amazingly enough, such a description naturally arises when light-quark chiral symmetry and heavy-quark spin symmetry are incorporated in an effective Lagrangian. I interpret the resulting spectrum in terms of nonabelian induced (Berry) potentials in analogy to diatomic molecular systems.

In the Skyrme model, the Lagrangian can be quantized in several ways using the collective coordinate approach. Not all of which produce quantum states that can be interpreted as physical particles. For example the SU(2) collective coordinate approach produces both integral and half-integral spin and isospin states. Only half of these are the physical baryons. Less well known is the fact that it is equally possible to quantize the system using the SO(3) collective coordinates....

We study the baryonic sector of QCD with quarks in the two index symmetric or antisymmetric representation. The minimal gauge invariant state that carries baryon number cannot be identified with the Skyrmion of the low energy chiral effective Lagrangian. Mass, statistics and baryon number do not match. We carefully investigate the properties of the minimal baryon in the large N limit and we find that it is unstable under formation of bound states with higher baryonic number. ...

Skyrmions were originally introduced in Particle Physics as a possible mechanism to explain the stability of particles. Lately the concept has been applied in Condensed Matter Physics to describe the newly discovered topologically protected magnetic configurations called the magnetic Skyrmions. This elementary review introduces the concept at a level suitable for beginning students of Physics.

We review recent development on combining heavy-quark symmetry and chiral symmetry in the skyrmion structure of the baryons containing one or more heavy quarks, c (charmed) and b (bottom). We describe two approaches: One going from the chiral symmetry regime of light quarks to the heavy-quark symmetry regime which will be referred to as ``bottom-up" approach and the other going down from the heavy-quark limit to the realistic finite-mass regime which will be referred to as ``...

Rare hyperon yields such as the Omega and AntiOmega in heavy ion collision experiments are hard to be reproduced by numerical models. This, in combination with the thermal fit to SPS data, seems to call for a new production mechanism beyond the usual ones. Small domain disoriented chiral condensates (DCC) were proposed to be such a source of rare hyperons through skyrmion formation at the chiral phase transition. Here skyrmions are treated as coherent states of baryons on a c...

It is well-known that the winding number of the Skyrmion can be identified as the baryon number. We show in this paper that this result can also be established using the Atiyah-Singer index theorem and spectral flow arguments. We argue that this proof suggests that there are light quarks moving in the field of the Skyrmion. We then show that if these light degrees of freedom are averaged out, the low energy excitations of the Skyrmion are in fact spinorial. A natural conseque...

Skyrmions with a realistic value of the pion mass parameter are expected to be quite compact structures, but beyond baryon number B=8 only a few examples are known. The largest of these is the cubically symmetric B=32 Skyrmion which is a truncated piece of the Skyrme crystal. Here it is proposed that many more such Skyrmions could be found, without any restriction on the baryon number, as pieces of the Skyrme crystal. Particular attention is given to the possibility of reduci...

Recently it has been pointed out that the skyrmions carry two independent topology, the baryon topology and the monopole topology. We provide more evidence to support this. In specific, we prove that the baryon number $B$ can be decomposed to the monopole number $m$ and the shell number $n$, so that $B$ is given by $B=mn$. This tells that the skyrmions may more conveniently be classified by two integers $(m,n)$. This is because the rational map which determines the baryon num...