Hosted by: Heikki Mantysaari

The Skyrme model is a candidate to describe the low energy regime of QCD where baryons and nuclei are topological excitations in a low-energy effective field theory of pions. The Skyrme model and its BPS variant (Skyrme model with a lower topological energy bound which is saturated) have been applied to the description of nuclei with notable recent success, e.g. quantitative description of Carbon-12 (including the Holye state and its rotational band) and of the low-lying energy spectrum of Oxygen-16. In this talk, we test Skyrme theories as models for nuclear matter at high densities and explore the thermodynamical properties of skyrmionic matter at zero temperature. We compute analytically the mean-field equation of state in the high and medium pressure regimes by applying topological bounds on compact domains. We identify which term in a generalised Skyrme model is responsible for which part in the equation of state and compare our findings with the corresponding results in the Walecka model. We find that the BPS submodel plays the dominant role at large densities. The BPS Skyrme model even allows us to derive thermodynamical variables and densities directly from the theory without having to perform a mean-field limit. This distinguishes the BPS Skyrme model from other models of nuclear matter where usually a mean-field limit has to be performed. Note that this is the first of two talks on Skyrme models and their predictions for nuclear matter at high densities. The second part on the description of neutron stars as Skyrme solitons will be given by Carlos Naya (Durham) on March, 24th at BNL.