Vibrational modes of Skyrmions

Abstract

We study the vibrational modes of Skyrmions with baryon numbers one through eight in the standard Skyrme model. The vibrational modes are found in the harmonic approximation around the classical soliton solution and the real parts of the frequencies of the modes are extracted. We further classify the vibrational modes into representations of the symmetries possessed by the Skyrmion solutions. We find that there are approximately 7B low-lying modes for a Skyrmion with baryon number B, in addition to an infinite continuum of scattering modes. This result suggests that the instanton moduli space, which is 8B-dimensional, does not accurately describe the deformation space of Skyrmions as previously conjectured.