Nuclei as near BPS-Skyrmions

TL;DR

This paper explores a generalized Skyrme model with additional terms, deriving analytical BPS solutions, and demonstrates that these solutions can accurately reproduce nuclear masses and binding energies, with minimal perturbations from added terms.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized Skyrme model with a sixth-order term, providing analytical BPS solutions and showing these solutions effectively approximate nuclear properties.

Findings

Analytical BPS-type solutions are well-behaved and match isotope masses.

Additional model terms cause only small perturbations.

Calculated binding energies align closely with experimental data.

Abstract

We study a generalization of the Skyrme model with the inclusion of a sixth-order term and a generalized mass term. We first analyze the model in a regime where the nonlinear sigma and Skyrme terms are switched to zero which leads to well-behaved analytical BPS-type solutions. Adding contributions from the rotational energy, we reproduce the mass of the most abundant isotopes to rather good accuracy. These BPS-type solutions are then used to compute the contributions from the nonlinear sigma and Skyrme terms when these are switched on. We then adjust the four parameters of the model using two different procedures and find that the additional terms only represent small perturbations to the system. We finally calculate the binding energy per nucleon and compare our results with the experimental values.