Speaker
Mr
Nicolas Giasson
(Université Laval)
Description
The Skyrme model, which was first proposed over half a century ago, is now understood as a low-energy effective theory of QCD where baryons (and nuclei) emerge as topological solitons. It provides a relatively good picture of the nucleons, but it overestimates their binding energies in nuclei by at least an order of magnitude. The present work is based on a recent extension of the original Skyrme model, the so-called near-BPS Skyrme Model. In the pure BPS limit of the model, there exists an infinite dimensional family of solutions with zero binding energy. On the other hand, the solutions that arise from the near-BPS model nearly saturate the Bogomol'nyi bound which means that by construction there must have small binding energies. However, there remains an open question: what solution configuration minimizes the energy? Numerical calculations run into problems when one attempts to provide such an answer. Here, instead, we compare the two most prominent configurations, the axial and rational map ansatz, for a class of hybrid model that goes from the original to the pure BPS Skyrme model. Our results suggest that the axial solution is the lowest energy configurations for the set of parameters for which the binding energy per nucleon B/A agrees best with the experimental data thereby supporting even further the idea that nuclei could be near-BPS Skyrmions.
Author
Luc Marleau
(Université Laval)
Co-author
Mr
Nicolas Giasson
(Université Laval)
