Classically Spinning Skyrmions

Skyrmions arise as topological soliton solutions in the Skyrme model which has been shown to be a low energy effective theory of QCD in the large NC limit. If quantized suitably, they can be used to describe structure and properties of nucleons and nuclei. We argue that the semiclassical rigid-body quantization, commonly used in the literature, has several shortcomings and that removing this simplication may result in a more accurate description of nucleons and nuclei. We present an extensive numerical study of spinning, arbitrarily deforming Skyrmions of topological charge B = 1-4.