Speaker
Description
Skyrmions were originally proposed in QCD as topological solitons of the pion field, providing an emergent description of baryons without introducing additional degrees of freedom. Their topological nature and possible role as dark matter candidates have since motivated the search for analogous configurations in other theories. A common expectation, however, is that stabilizing skyrmions requires intrinsically non-perturbative physics.
In this talk, we challenge this expectation. Using toy models that capture different limits of the electroweak sector of the Standard Model, we show that skyrmions which are not classically stable at zero temperature can instead be stabilized by thermal effects arising perturbatively at loop level. This motivates a broader investigation of skyrmions within the quantum effective action of the Standard Model.