Baby Skyrmions in AdS

TL;DR

This paper investigates baby Skyrmions in Anti-de Sitter space, revealing how curvature influences solutions, and uncovers layered structures and popcorn transitions in higher topological charge configurations.

Contribution

It demonstrates the behavior of massless baby Skyrmions in AdS, introduces numerical solutions for multi-layer configurations, and develops a point-particle approximation to predict complex soliton structures.

Findings

Radial solutions decay similarly to massive flat space models.

Higher charge solutions form concentric rings.

Popcorn transitions occur at specific topological charges.

Abstract

We study the baby Skyrme model in a pure AdS background without a mass term. The tail decays and scalings of massless radial solutions are demonstrated to take a similar form to those of the massive flat space model, with the AdS curvature playing a similar role to the flat space pion mass. We also numerically find minimal energy solutions for a range of higher topological charges and find that they form concentric ring-like solutions. Popcorn transitions (named in analogy with studies of toy models of holographic QCD) from an n layer to an n+1-layer configuration are observed at topological charges 9 and 27 and further popcorn transitions for higher charges are predicted. Finally, a point-particle approximation for the model is derived and used to successfully predict the ring structures and popcorn transitions for higher charge solitons.