Abstract

T.H.R. Skyrme published his seminal paper on what are now called Skyrmions in 1961. It was the first proposal to model a particle (in this case anucleon) as a topological soliton. Skyrmions give a remarkable topological interpretation of the conservation of baryon number, and of the spin/statistics of nucleons. Subsequently, many other topologicalsolitons have been studied, like monopoles, instantons, and branes. The original Skyrmions have been applied to understand the structure of nuclei, and a two-dimensional variant (a Baby Skyrmion) has in 2010 been observed in an exotic magnet.

To celebrate 50 years of Skyrmions, we have arranged a series of occasional lectures in DAMTP over the coming six months on their different aspects and applications. This talk will introduce Skyrmions, and give a brief history of Skyrme’s thinking and how studies of skyrmions haveevolved over the last 50 years.

Special Location! For this week only the colloquium is in MR5 .