BPS Skyrmions as neutron stars

Understand

The BPS Skyrme model has been demonstrated already to provide a physically intriguing and quantitatively reliable description of nuclear matter.

• Indeed, the model has both the symmetries and the energy-momentum tensor of a perfect fluid, and thus represents a field theoretic realization of the "liquid droplet" model of nuclear matter.
• In addition, the classical soliton solutions together with some obvious corrections (spin-isospin quantization, Coulomb energy, proton-neutron mass difference) provide an accurate modeling of nuclear binding energies for heavier nuclei.
• These results lead to the rather natural proposal to try to describe also neutron stars by the BPS Skyrme model coupled to gravity.