Skyrme crystals with massive pions

Abstract

The crystalline structure of nuclear matter is investigated in the standard Skyrme model with massive pions. A semi-analytic method is developed to determine local minima of the static energy functional with respect to variations of both the field and the period lattice of the crystal. Four distinct Skyrme crystals are found. Two of these were already known -- the cubic lattice of half-skyrmions and the $\alpha$-particle crystal -- but two are new. These new solutions have lower energy per baryon number and less symmetry, being periodic with respect to trigonal but not cubic period lattices. Minimal energy crystals are also constructed under the constraint of constant baryon density, and its shown that the two new non-cubic crystals tend to chain and multi-wall solutions at low densities.

arXiv comment24 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Generalized skyrmion crystals with applications to neutron stars
• Skyrmion crystals stabilized by $\omega$-mesons
• Vortex lattices and critical fields in anisotropic superconductors
• Domain Wall Networks as Skyrmion Crystals in Chiral Magnets
• Baby skyrmion crystals stabilized by vector mesons
• Compressibility of dense nuclear matter in the $\rho$-meson variant of the Skyrme model