Cutoff quantization and the Skyrmion

The putative classical soliton in the minimal nonlinear σ model (no Skyrme term) is known to be unstable to collapse. We note that the imposition of a short-distance cutoff (which is anyway physically reasonable for a nonrenormalizable model) yields a stable classical soliton. We further suggest that this cutoff, carrying as it does some implicit dynamical information, be treated as a quantized dynamical variable. The resulting one- (experimentally fixed) parameter model agrees with experiment roughly as well as the simple σ model with the Skyrme term. We interpret this feature as an indication of the robustness of the description of the nucleon as being dominated by a hedgehog-type meson cloud. It is suggested that the same approach might be useful in some other situations where the long-distance description of the physics is more precisely known than is the short-distance description