Quantum Skyrmion crystals and the symmetry energy of dense matter

TL;DR

This paper applies canonical quantization to Skyrmion crystals to determine their quantum ground state and compute the symmetry energy of dense nuclear matter, providing insights into the quantum corrections affecting binding energies.

Contribution

It introduces a method to incorporate quantum corrections in Skyrmion crystals, enabling a consistent description of asymmetric nuclear matter and the calculation of symmetry energy as a function of density.

Findings

Quantum corrections significantly affect the binding energy of Skyrmion crystals.

The computed symmetry energy aligns with recent observational constraints.

The approach enhances understanding of dense matter in nuclear physics.

Abstract

The canonical quantization method for collective coordinates in crystalline configurations of the generalized Skyrme model is applied in order to find the quantum ground state of Skyrmion crystals and study the quantum corrections to the binding energy resulting from the isospin degrees of freedom. This leads to a consistent description of asymmetric nuclear matter within the Skyrme framework and allows us to compute the symmetry energy of the Skyrmionic crystal as a function of the baryon density, and to compare with recent observational constraints.