Genesis and Evolution of the Skyrme Model From 1954 to the Present

Abstract

Not widely known facts on the genesis of the Skyrme model are presented in a historical survey, based on Skyrme's earliest papers and on his own published remembrance. We consider the evolution of Skyrme's model description of nuclear matter from the "Mesonic Fluid" model up to its final version, known as the baryon model. We pay special tribute to some well-known ideas in contemporary particle physics which one can find in Skyrme's earlier papers, such as: Nuclear Democracy, the Solitonic Mechanism, the Nonlinear Realization of Chiral Symmetry, Topological Charges, Fermi–Bose Transmutations, etc. It is curious to note in the final version of the Skyrme model gleams of Kelvin's "Vortex Atoms" theory. In conclusion we make a brief analysis of the validity of Skyrme's conjectures in view of recent results and pinpoint some questions which still remain.