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Skyrmions and the pion mass

Richard Battye, Paul Sutcliffe

hep-pharXiv:hep-ph/0410157

Abstract

We present numerical evidence that suggests the introduction of a non-zero pion mass might dramatically affect the structure of minimal energy Skyrmions. It appears that the shell-like Skyrmions which are the minima when the pions are massless can fail to be minimal energy bound states for particular baryon numbers, with a strong dependence upon the value of the pion mass. The effects of a pion mass may include the replacement of shell-like configurations with crystal chunks and the loss of shell-like bound states with baryon numbers five and eight; which is in agreement with expectations based on real nuclei.

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