Hosted by: Heikki Mantysaari

The Skyrme model is a low energy effective field theory of strong interactions where nuclei and baryons appear as collective excitations of pionic degrees of freedom. Proposed by Tony Skyrme in the sixties, his ideas received further support when it was discovered that in the limit of the large number of colours of QCD, an effective theory of mesons arises. In the last years, there has been a revival of Skyrme's ideas and new related models, some of them with BPS bounds (topological lower energy bounds), have been proposed. It is the aim of this talk to focus on the one known as BPS Skyrme model. After a brief introduction to this BPS limit we study its application to neutron stars where we will find that high maximal masses are supported. In addition, the BPS Skyrme model allow us to perform both mean-field and exact calculations and a comparison between both approaches will be presented.