# A Solitonic Approach to Holographic Nuclear Physics

## TL;DR

This paper uses holographic models to analyze nuclear physics, revealing classical soliton descriptions of baryons, their interactions, and bound states, including the deuteron, within a large N_c and large lambda framework.

## Contribution

It introduces a solitonic approach to holographic nuclear physics, computing nuclear bound states and their properties in the Sakai-Sugimoto model at large N_c and lambda.

## Key findings

- Classical solitons describe baryons in the model.
- Bound states for baryon numbers up to eight are characterized.
- The deuteron state is identified as a quantized zero mode.

## Abstract

We discuss nuclear physics in the Sakai-Sugimoto model in the limit of large number $N_c$ of colors and large 't Hooft coupling $\lambda$. In this limit the individual baryons are described by classical solitons whose size is much smaller than the typical distance at which they settle in a nuclear bound state. We can thus use the linear approximation outside the instanton cores to compute the interaction potential. We find the classical geometry of nuclear bound states for baryon number up to eight. One of the interesting features that we find is that holographic nuclear physics provides a natural description for lightly bound states when $\lambda$ is large. For the case of two nuclei, we also find the topology and metric of the manifold of zero modes and, quantizing it, we find that the ground state can be identified with the deuteron state. We discuss the relations with other methods in the literature used to study Skyrmions and holographic nuclear physics. We discuss $1/{N_c}$ and $1/\lambda$ corrections and the challenges to overcome to reach the phenomenological values to fit with real QCD.